Emergent Constraints: Bridging the Gap Between Models and Observations
February 28, 2024
Emergent constraints have become a powerful tool in climate science, allowing us to reduce uncertainty in climate projections by identifying relationships between observable quantities and future climate change. In this post, I'll discuss how we can leverage these constraints to improve our understanding of climate sensitivity.
The concept of emergent constraints is based on a simple but powerful idea: if we can find relationships between current climate variability and future climate change that are consistent across models, we can use these relationships to constrain our projections.
Some key aspects of emergent constraints include:
- Statistical relationships between present and future climate
- Physical mechanisms underlying these relationships
- Robustness across different climate models
My research focuses on developing new methods to identify and validate these constraints, particularly in the context of equilibrium climate sensitivity. By combining traditional climate science approaches with modern statistical techniques, we can make more reliable predictions about future climate change.