Speaker
Description
Climate change is one of the most pressing societal and economic issues, but also one of the most complex scientific challenges. While there is overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is already happening, uncertainties in climate change projections have remained very large. For instance, current estimates of the equilibrium global-mean warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations amount to 3 ± 1.5 K. During the last 40 years, this estimate has neither significantly shifted nor narrowed. The main cause behind the slow progress is the representation of clouds in climate models, especially of small-scale convective clouds (i.e. thunderstorms, rain showers, shallow convective cloud layers). With the advent of high-resolution climate models, there are now promising prospects, as it becomes feasible to formulate the models much closer to first principles. The presentation will discuss this potential and present recent progress in this area.
