Project 7:
Forecasting climate tipping events
Some parts of the climate system could cross a threshold, or “tipping point”, beyond which change becomes self-sustaining and hard to reverse. Knowing how close we are to such thresholds — and whether early warning signals can reliably be detected before they are crossed — is one of the most pressing questions in climate science.
Through Project VERIFY, we are helping to build an early warning system for climate tipping points. The project is led by David Thornalley, co-led with Dr Ruza Ivanovic at the University of Leeds, and brings together paleoclimate reconstructions, observations, statistics and artificial intelligence. We use “Digital Twins” — highly detailed computer simulations trained on real-world data — to test how reliable candidate early warning signals really are, focusing on the Greenland Ice Sheet and the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre. Isaac Foreman joined the group as a PhD student on this project.
VERIFY is funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) with around £5 million, as part of ARIA’s £81 million Forecasting Tipping Points programme. You can read more about the award in the UCL news announcement.