Can Our Understanding of Climate Keep Up With Observed Changes?

Climate change is increasingly apparent to the general public through increasing heat waves, intense rainfall, flooding events, and sea level rise. However, while there have been great increases in climate model skill in the last decade across a swathe of important areas, there are still persistent biases and common assumptions that limit their utility at local or regional scales despite the growing demand for such information. This talk discusses the paths forward to increase climate model utility and the observational gaps and theoretical limits that will modulate any future progress, and considers whether observations may be outpacing the predictions.

Speaker
Gavin Schmidt, Author, "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" (W.W. Norton, 2009); Fellow, American Geophysical Union (AGU) and American Association for the Advancement of Science