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Climate change
projections |
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| Climate change predictions from the Hadley
Centre |
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This page shows some key results from climate-change experiments
conducted using Hadley Centre computer
models of the climate system.
The models are two versions of our coupled
atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (HadCM2
and HadCM3). The experiments assume
that future emissions of greenhouse gases will follow the IS92a
scenario, in which the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
more than doubles over the course of the 21st century. This
is a 'business as usual' scenario, which assumes mid-range economic
growth but no measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. |
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Click on the globe for an animation on a spinning globe
of the Earth showing surface air temperature change from an
IS92a experiment with HadCM2 including the cooling effect
of sulphate aerosols. You will need to have an MPEG viewer
installed to view the animation. The file is 2.2 Mbyte.
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It is important to be aware that predictions from climate models
are always subject to uncertainty because of limitations on
our knowledge of how the climate system works and on the computing
resources available. Different climate models can give different
predictions. For further results and discussion, see The
greenhouse effect and climate change - A briefing from the Hadley
Centre or Climate change and its impacts - Stabilisation
of CO2 in the atmosphere. These documents, published in
October 1999, can be obtained from the Hadley Centre (the briefing
is also available on CD-ROM). A range of results from various
Hadley Centre climate experiments are shown on the website of
the Climate Impacts
LINK project at the Climatic Research Unit, University of
East Anglia. The LINK project is the main source for supply
of Hadley Centre model data for use in research projects. A
more limited range of data is available from the website of
the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change Data Distribution Centre (IPCC DDC).
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| Climate change results from the Hadley Centre |
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Some of the diagrams below
are maps of differences between the current climate, conventionally defined
as 1960-1990, and the climate of the end of the 21st century, taken to be
2070-2100. For most quantities, changes are shown both for the annual average
and for each of the four seasons December-January (DJF), March-May (MAM),
June-August (JJA) and September-November (SON). The other diagrams are time-series,
showing changes which occur as time passes.
The diagrams are provided in PostScript (PS) and GIF formats.
The data used to make each diagram is also available in network
common data form language (CDL). This is a plain-text equivalent
of network common data form (netCDF),
which is a machine-independent file format developed by and available
from Unidata. We use
the GDT netCDF convention.
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