Forecasting Tipping Points: Uniting climate measurements and models to create an early warning system

Description

For more info see here ARIA is an R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. We empower scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is technologically or scientifically possible. We will reach across disciplines, sectors and institutions to shape, fund and manage projects across the R&D ecosystem, from startups to universities, to break down silos and discover new pathways. We are looking for proposals for our Forecasting Tipping Points programme. For more info see https://www.aria.org.uk/forecasting-tipping-points Lot 1: Why this programme Major parts of the Earth system are at risk of crossing climate tipping points within the next century, with severe consequences for biodiversity, food security, agriculture, and humanity. Despite the potential impact, we're poorly equipped to characterise the long-term trends of our climate systems, or predict the future risk of runaway, self-perpetuating change. Our best observational datasets are at a nascent stage, while our best climate models are computationally expensive and do not capture all the physical processes we need. What we're shooting for Combining expertise in observation and modelling with innovative sensing systems, we'll look to develop a proof-of-concept for an early warning system for climate tipping points that is affordable, sustainable and justified. We'll achieve this through a targeted deployment of low-cost sensing systems, to be tested in a multi-year field campaign, whose data can be integrated with advances in physics- and AI-driven models to push the frontiers of knowledge for climate tipping points. By unifying these approaches, we're aiming to confidently predict when a system will tip, what the consequences be, and how quickly that change will unfold.Our goal: to create an early warning system for tipping points that equips the world with the information we need to build resilience and accelerate proactive climate adaptation.