Speaker at UF to discuss ability to trust Fla. climate model projections

October 3, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe will look at the climate projections for Florida in a lecture Thursday at the University of Florida.

Hayhoe, a research associate professor at Texas Tech University, will speak at 3:30 p.m. in Room 209, Emerson Alumni Hall.

The seminar titled “Climate Projections for Florida: Can we trust the models” is co-sponsored by the Florida Climate Institute and the UF Water Institute. It’s free and open to the public. It will be streamed live at http://video.ufl.edu/service2/public/pub_showMain.php?id=31924.

Because global models are not yet capable of resolving many of the processes and dynamics that affect climate over Florida and other regions, Hayhoe will examine the extent to which it is possible to quantify confidence in climate projections through combining critical analysis of global models with advanced downscaling approaches.

She will first evaluate the ability of the current generation of global climate models to reproduce key features of climate over Florida, including annual cycles in temperature and precipitation, as well as observed relationships between natural modes of variability, such as ENSO, and climate anomalies. Second, Hayhoe will present an approach for removing model uncertainty due to climate sensitivity from future projections, and discuss the implications of these projections for Florida’s future climate.

Her areas of expertise include greenhouse gas emissions and control policies, numerical modeling of the earth-atmosphere systems, and regional assessments of climate change impacts across a range of sectors including water resources, human health, agriculture and natural ecosystems.

Katharine served as a lead author on the federal USGCRP report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” and is serving on the National Academy of Science committee, “Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations.”

In addition to these projects, she has participated in and led multi-disciplinary teams to assess the effects of climate change on regions including the Great Lakes, the state of California, the U.S. Northeast, the Midwest, the city of Chicago and, most recently, the eastern Mediterranean region.

These assessments, accompanied by briefings to government, stakeholder, and industry groups, have resulted in her work being cited in the IPCC Assessment Reports, presented before Congress, and highlighted by state and federal agencies as motivation for the implementation of policies to reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases.