Project description
Breaking free from historical constraints to unravel the mysteries of extreme weather
In the face of escalating climate change, the challenge of connecting local weather dynamics with large-scale circulation has long perplexed scientists. Hail, rain, and strong winds are linked to both cloud updrafts and general circulation. Traditionally, computing constraints led to separate analyses, fostering uncertainties in projecting future extremes. With this in mind, the ERC-funded RECONCILE project departs from conventional models. It focuses on storm populations, adopting an ecological paradigm. This innovative approach promises to break down biases and constraints, offering unprecedented insights into dynamic coherence across scales. With implications for climate model evaluation, RECONCILE charts a groundbreaking course at the nexus of weather and climate extremes, and clouds, circulation, and climate sensitivity.
Objective
As climate changes, weather becomes more severe. This has been of long-standing concern, and difficulties arise in connecting the two different ranges of scales involved. Hail, rainshowers and strong winds result from the local dynamics of cloud updrafts, while the general circulation determines the relative occurrence of convective regimes to maintain energy balance. Historically, limitations in computing power mostly led to separate analyses of cloud dynamics and the large-scale circulation. The mesoscales, in-between, host a rich ecosystem of weather features, organized in a diversity of shapes and morphologies but overly simplified in traditional climate models.
This scale separation leads to large uncertainties in the projection of future extremes: the dynamic adjustment of weather systems to the large-scale flow is unconstrained, and small-scale perturbations may feed back onto the global climate state.
RECONCILE revisits how the multi-scale character of extreme precipitation emerges from the interaction between storms and the large-scale circulation. It introduces a novel approach by focusing on the dynamics of storm populations rather than individual storm objects. This paradigm of populations is borrowed from ecology and scarcely used in climate physics. It allows to overcome strong biases present in operational climate models, by allowing for a diversity in the represented cloud structures and an explicit two-way interaction across the continuum of scales.
The current emergence of global storm-resolving models is an unprecendented opportunity to investigate this dynamic coherence across multiple scales of motion. RECONCILE proposes a way forward, at the intersection of two WCRP's grand challenges: Weather and Climate Extremes, and Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity, with strong implications for climate model evaluation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75794 Paris
France