Celebration time: PRECISE

Quick update: our project website is now live where updates will be posted as we go…

The news is now officially out: I’m really delighted to announce the funding of our large project, PRECISE, by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

The project is led by Professor Christine Hvidberg at the Niels Bohr Institute and there is a really nice interview with her on their website about our plans that’s worth a read. I’m co-PI and lead on surface mass balance processes and coupled climate models within the project so I thought it might be worth giving a quick overview of what we hope to achieve.

TL;DR? We will be improving estimates of and assessing the uncertainties in sea level rise projections from the two big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Slightly longer version: we’re using new approaches from materials science to incorporate “new” physics in ice sheet models. We’re also integrating in-situ observations and satellite data into our model frameworks and using these to train machine-learning tools. My work package will emulate our physics based numerical climate models to expand the ensemble and generate a statistical approach for assessing ice sheet stability as well as investigating important feedbacks between different elements of the earth system. Finally, we (or rather my colleague Christian Rodehacke and his postdoc) will run our coupled climate – ice sheet model (EC-EARTH-PISM), including these advances, to generate new sea level rise projections.

The outputs from all these experiments will be communicated and developed in collaboration with the Danish Klima Atlas (Climate Atlas) to ensure we are focused on the right kind of data and time periods for use by stakeholders and local populations when it comes to adaptation planning.

So why this project?

One of the most iconic images to come out of the last IPCC 6th asessment report (at least in my little corner of the climate science universe) is this one on sea level rise projections out to 2100.

Much of climate science has, at least to some extent been “solved”. At least in the sense that we understand the mechanisms and processes quite well and the remaining uncertainty is to some extent tinkering around the edges, often bound up with uncertainty on scenario, or related to impacts – there’s still quite large uncertainty on what will happen to the Amazon rainforest at different levels of emissions for example. However, sea level rise is really an exception to this. It’s very difficult to be sure that some very unpleasant surprises are really implausible.

We’re reasonably certain that global mean sea level will rise by at least 2 metres and around a metre by the end of this century with further sea level rise likely to continue perhaps for centuries.

The IPCC for example, concluded that sea level rise of 15 metres or more by 2300 can’t be ruled out, even if it seems rather unlikely. And this poses a pretty large problem to planners, politicians, stakeholders and providers of coastal services. Working out how far and how fast we expect the sea to rise is really our challenge.

But there is also a risk of abrupt and extreme sea level rise that could come round the corner to surprise us. However, it’s hard to know how likely this is or even how to evaluate that risk.

This has become something of a theme for me in the last few years. I have been working on the Horizon 2020 project PROTECT which very much focuses on the cryosphere and sea level rise, and I’m coordinating Horizon Europe’s OCEAN:ICE which focuses much more on the influence and feedbacks between Antarctic ice sheet and ocean.

Where PRECISE differs is that we have the flexibility within this project to develop new and innovative techniques that we’re not quite sure will work: especially the development of machine learning tools.

The EU science budget is a brilliant thing, but risky research is difficult to get through, the Move Nordisk challenge centres allow us to try really new and, yes, risky techniques. Though climate is a new topic for them, so we’re very much test bunnies in this new phase of funding science for them.

So what are we going to be doing practically?

Our partners at NBI include Joachim Mathiesen, Helle Astrid Kjær, Aslak Grinsted and Nicholas Rathmann. They will be focusing on assembling field data from both ice sheets, and developing new physical solutions for ice sheet models based on solutions from materials science. They will be looking at phase field approaches for ice flow, at new solutions for calving and ice fracture and integrating these into ice dynamical models. NBI will also be doing fieldwork to collect new surface mass budget (SMB) data from the ice sheets.

The SMB part of the work is part that I’m especially involved in. Not just in modelling SMB with our climate and weather models as we do on the polar portal but also in getting a much better understanding on the uncertainty in these models associated with precipitation (which is much higher than that associated with e.g. temperature, especially when it is snowfall). So new observations with a high time resolution will be key for improving our current snowpack models.

We will also be working on bringing regional climate emulators into use over both ice sheets to see how varying starting conditions will vary the outcomes. We know that on a chaotic system like weather starting conditions are key and emulators allow us to do many many more experiments than with our physics based numerical codes alone. It’s pretty cutting edge stuff right now but I know several groups are working on this – including this fantastic paper that recently came out of the Delft/Leuven group, which really shows what is possible

Our other collaborator, Hilmar Gudmundsson at University Northumbria Newcastle will be working on implementing these processes in ice sheet models and examining how plausible instability in ice sheet simulations is using ensembles of multiple model simulations. They will also be using and developing their ice shelf emulator to look at basal melting and investigating the potential instabilities in Antarctic ice shelves that could lead to abrupt sea level rise.

Finally, bringing it all together, our EC-Earth-PISM model will be deployed to do coupled climate and ice sheet simulations to see how the two ice sheets influence each other. This work will mostly be supervised by my DMI colleague Christian Rodehacke.

The project will receive 42 million Danish kroner in total (about 5 million euros) of which 8 million dkk will fund work at DMI, work to be carried out by 2 postdocs and a PhD student (so if this sounds like something you’d be interested in working on do get in touch) over the next 6 years from September. In fact most of the funding we have received will go directly to early career scientists, there is nothing in the budget for us seniors! Naturally this has some disadvantages, but given the rapidly aging population wihtin Europe and European science, I see it as a positive and we have lots of cool summer schools, bootcamps and other networking activities planned that will hopefully reach out beyonf PRECISE to the rest of the ice sheet – climate community.

So watch this space…