RRS Discovery - one of the NERC fleet of Royal Reseach Ships available for the scientific community.

What will happen to the climate of the UK and NW Europe? Will global warming be a major problem for us, or just make the summer a nicer time for a barbeque at the beach? Are the changes we are observing entirely natural or is human activity to blame? Climate always varies over time, but has been very stable for the last 10 thousand years, roughly the period where human civilisation has developed. Is this period of stability about to end? The international CLIVAR Programme aims to provide answers to these sort of questions.

CLIVAR exists to:
Explore the predictability of the climate system on seasonal, annual and decadal timescales.

Enable improvements in our ability to make predictions of seasonal climate and climate change.

Enhance our ability to distinguish anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change from natural variability.

The tools needed for CLIVAR are observations from in-situ instruments (i.e. data obtained from ships, buoys and drifting instruments), proxy datasets (i.e. historical climate records obtained from the analysis of tree rings, corals, sediments, ice cores etc.), remote sensing (i.e. data obtained using satellites & aircraft) and coupled models (computer simulations of the climate system) – all are areas where UK scientists are among the world leaders and able to make an important contribution.

A major focus for UK CLIVAR is the North Atlantic Ocean. This has comprised of three primary areas of research:

1. Storms, gyres and the NAO – the mechanisms of North Atlantic variability, supported by the COAPEC (Coupled Ocean-Earth Processes and European Climate) programme. The final COAPEC science meeting took place in May 2005.

2. Rapid Climate Change – Could the Thermohaline Circulation 'switch off' or reduce in intensity? Could changes happen in decades rather than centuries - or could short term warming lead to a new ice age? These important questions are addressed primarily by the RAPID programme. RAPID is a large ongoing research programme with substantial funding from the UK Government via NERC. A major highlight has been the establishment of the 26.5 degree North Atlantic Monitoring Array, a series of moored instruments placed at intervals across the North Atlantic Ocean - see http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/rapidmoc/ for details.

3. Interactions of the Atlantic with the Global Climate System with an emphasis on El Nino and interactions with the Southern Ocean.

Other components of UK CLIVAR include use of our world class expertise in global coupled modelling and in the seasonal to decadal variability of the tropics. The research will be underpinned by the UK Argo profiling floats programme.

Who is taking part in UK CLIVAR?
Through major contributions from the Met Office, NERC Centres/Surveys and UK Universities, many of the UK’s leading research groups are actively involved in CLIVAR related projects. For a full list click on 'links to science partners & programmes' in the side-bar.

How is it funded?
UK CLIVAR is an umbrella term for the large number of climate variability related projects being undertaken in the UK, so it doesn't have its own budget. Individual components are largely paid for by their host institutes, but major programmes such as COAPEC and RAPID are funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The UK CLIVAR secretariat is currently hosted by the James Rennell Division for Ocean Circulation and Climate at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) where the work is part of our portfolio of science management tasks, serving the UK marine science community.

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Last update 14th December 2005