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Ambitious partnership needed for reliable climate prediction

Nature Climate Change volume 12, pages 499–503 (2022)Cite this article

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Current global climate models struggle to represent precipitation and related extreme events, with serious implications for the physical evidence base to support climate actions. A leap to kilometre-scale models could overcome this shortcoming but requires collaboration on an unprecedented scale.

Water is Earth’s life blood and fundamental to our future. Hydro-meteorological extremes (storms, floods and droughts) are among the costliest impacts of climate change, and changes in the seasonality and natural variability of precipitation can have profound effects on many living systems, in turn threatening our food security, water security, health and infrastructure investments. Yet the current generation of global climate models struggles to represent precipitation and related extreme events, especially on local and regional scales1,2. The model precipitation biases are substantial in both space and time, and in the tropics they overwhelm the projected signal of climate change3. Despite decades of enormous efforts by the community, these biases have remained stubbornly intractable1,2 (Box 1). Consequently, future scenarios of precipitation remain very uncertain in the IPCC assessments so far4. As water is an essential resource for humans and ecosystems, these shortcomings complicate efforts to effectively adapt to climate change, particularly in the Global South, and to assess the risk of catastrophic regional changes.

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Fig. 1: The realism of k-scale global climate modelling.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Julia Slingo & Paul Bates

  2. Fathom, Bristol, UK

    Paul Bates

  3. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK

    Peter Bauer

  4. Met Office, Exeter, UK

    Stephen Belcher

  5. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Tim Palmer

  6. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Graeme Stephens

  7. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Bjorn Stevens

  8. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas Stocker

  9. Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

    Georg Teutsch

Authors
  1. Julia Slingo
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  2. Paul Bates
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  3. Peter Bauer
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  4. Stephen Belcher
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  5. Tim Palmer
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  6. Graeme Stephens
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  7. Bjorn Stevens
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  8. Thomas Stocker
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  9. Georg Teutsch
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Contributions

J.S. led the writing of the manuscript, drawing on expertise from all the authors; she also contributed expert knowledge of tropical convection and its role in the global climate system. P. Bates provided expertise in hydrological modelling; P. Bauer provided expertise in exascale computing and digital technologies; S.B. provided evidence of the impact of k-scale regional climate projections; T.P. provided expertise on multi-scale atmospheric dynamics and climate predictability; G.S. provided expertise on clouds and Earth observation; B.S. contributed pioneering global k-scale simulations; T.S. provided expertise in IPCC climate evidence base; and G.T. provided supporting evidence for k-scale models based on climate applications. All authors reviewed, revised and approved the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julia Slingo.

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Slingo, J., Bates, P., Bauer, P. et al. Ambitious partnership needed for reliable climate prediction. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 499–503 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01384-8

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