Climate research is a wide-ranging field of study that investigates Earth’s atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial systems. It relies on a broad spectrum of observational and theoretical tools, including data visualization, hydrology, high-performance computing, geospatial sciences and more. Its goals are to document and predict both long-term trends and short-term events.
For example, scientists have long observed that Earth’s atmosphere acts as an insulating blanket that traps some of the Sun’s heat, warming the planet. But the phenomenon was not fully understood until 1824, when Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet at our distance from the Sun should be much colder and suggested a blanket made of carbon dioxide and water vapor would trap escaping infrared radiation. More recently, researchers have used complex computer models to understand how changes in the oceans, atmosphere and land surface are linked.
The process of climate change is well documented by the work of many researchers across the globe, and there is a growing consensus that human activities are contributing to the phenomenon. But determining how to best adapt to this new normal is challenging. Research can help to identify impacts such as stronger and more frequent storms, shorter growing seasons in some regions and shifts in the range of migratory animals and plants (see PNNL’s resources on Climate Impacts).
Attribution studies can quantify how likely or unlikely a particular event was under preindustrial versus present greenhouse gas conditions. This approach involves basic empirical-statistical analysis as well as more sophisticated “fingerprint” studies, in which GCMs/ESMs are run with different combinations of causal factors and a specific target variable or field is varied over time; the resulting simulated pattern of change in that target is then compared to the observations to determine its cause (see PNNL’s resources on Probabilistic Event Attribution). Observational datasets, gridded station-based temperature, precipitation and sea level rise data, and climate model output are some of the most prominent products of climate science.