NCAS awarded funding to push the frontiers of environmental research
The National Centre for Atmospheric Science has been awarded funding from the Natural Environment Research Council to deliver three ambitious new projects under their Pushing the Frontiers of Environmental Research programme.
These projects are designed to take high-risk, high-reward approaches to some of the most pressing challenges in climate change and air pollution research.
Understanding future global warming
A project led by Professor Jonathan Gregory will tackle one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science: what changes will there be in cloud cover in response to increasing carbon dioxide emissions? Clouds both reflect sunlight (keeping the climate cooler) and insulate the Earth from losing heat to space (keeping the climate warmer) – so changes in cloud cover are a critical aspect of our global climate.
The collaborative project team – including NCAS, University of Reading, and Imperial College London – are aiming to improve future climate models and the regional projections for the 21st century, and go on to provide more reliable information to guide international climate policy.
We’re going to try and reduce the uncertainty by focusing on processes of climate change that we have already seen. For instance, how clouds have changed in response to surface temperature in recent years. The ocean is important as well as the atmosphere, because of its influence on the geographical pattern of sea surface warming, which affects the clouds. We hope that our emphasis on agreement with observed climate change will enable us to find ways to make climate projections more useful to society.
– Professor Jonathan Gregory, senior research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading.
Investigating destructive winter storms
Dr Ben Harvey will lead research into diabatic Rossby waves – a little-studied type of weather system that can intensify into powerful winter storms. These storms, such as Storm Ciarán in November 2023, bring damaging winds and heavy rainfall over the UK and northwest Europe.
By examining how climate change could alter the frequency and severity of these storms, and how well they are represented in current climate models, the NCAS project team based at the University of Reading will improve confidence in future risk assessments – in partnership with the UK Met Office and ETH Zurich.
There has been no assessment to date of how climate change will impact diabatic Rossby waves, nor the extent to which current state-of-the-art climate models represent them. We’ll be using the unique capabilities of a new large suite of high-resolution climate model simulations to do this for the first time. This kind of analysis just hasn’t been possible before.
– Dr Ben Harvey, senior research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading.
Understanding emerging sources of nitrogen oxide
Led by Dr Peter Edwards, a new project will address one of the most pressing uncertainties in understanding atmospheric emissions: how significant nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from soil are in a world with declining combustion sources. NOx plays a critical role in air pollution, climate change, and the formation of secondary pollutants, yet recent work suggests current emissions inventories vastly underestimate contributions from agricultural soils.
It will be a collaboration between NCAS, University of York, and University of Warwick, where experts in atmospheric chemistry and microbial biogeochemistry will generate the most comprehensive dataset to date on soil NOx production and develop novel analytical techniques to trace its contribution to ambient NOx levels. This work will provide urgently needed updates to emissions inventories and help shape future environmental policy.
We’re entering a new era where traditional sources of NOx are rapidly declining, but our understanding of emerging sources like fertilised soils hasn’t kept pace. This project, known as NOISE, will give us the tools to quantify these changes and ensure our models and policies reflect the real world.
– Dr Pete Edwards, senior research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of York.
Together, these projects will advance scientific understanding of global warming, extreme weather, and air pollution – demonstrating how curiosity-driven research can help society prepare for the environmental challenges ahead.