Science
The COMBINE project has the following major objectives:
- To improve Earth system models by incorporating additional processes and representing more Earth system parameters. The processes selected for this project represent: C- and N-cycle; aerosols coupled with clouds and chemistry; stratospheric dynamics and increased resolution, and ice sheets, sea ice and permafrost for the cryosphere.
- To improve initialisation and error correction schemes for decadal climate predictions.
- To use the Earth system models for decadal climate prediction and climate projection experiments following the protocols of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project for IPCC AR5 simulations.
- To understand and quantify how single or combined new process components influence different climate feedbacks and the magnitude of projected climate change in the 21st century.
- To understand how the initialisation by itself or initialisation combined with improved process components or improved resolution can reduce the uncertainty in decadal climate prediction.
- To analyze projected climate change in three different climate regions: the Arctic, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Amazon basin; where different feedbacks are important. To analyse effects of selected new components in each region. To test if high spatial resolution has significant influence on strength of feedbacks.
- Quantify the impacts in two sectors: water availability and agriculture, globally and within the regions, and analyze the effect of selected new components on these impacts.
- Use Earth system models to find CO2 emissions that are compatible with representative concentration scenarios specified for IPCC AR5 climate projections, and use an integrated assessment model to revise the scenarios accordingly.
- Contribute to IPCC AR5 by relevant research and by disseminating climate prediction and projection data to IPCC data archives.