Professor Vicky Pope

Vicky Pope had a long and varied career in the Met Office. She worked for many years on climate change, leading climate model development, the wider climate programme and acting as the public face of the programme. In her last role she was Head of Science and Technology Futures and member of the Met Office Government Services Senior Management Board. Vicky is Independent Chair of MEI (Mathematics in Education and Industry), a Trustee of BRE Trust (the Building REasearch Establishment), the Devon Wildlife Trust and In2ScienceUK. She is also the National Labs lead for the Association of Research Innovation and Technology Organisations (AIRTO) and a member of the EPSRC Mathematics Science Advisory Team. She is also an honorary professor at UCL.

Abstract

Climate change – How Can Climate Models Help us to Respond?

Numerical models to simulate the weather were one of the first practical uses of high-performance computing. Today, the descendants of these models are used to make decisions every day affecting our social and economic well-being, as well as safety critical activities. The climate versions of these models are being used to make important choices about how much we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what trade-offs there are likely to be between adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change. They have profound implications for the decisions that we make about future energy supply and other economic and technological development.

One of the key challenges is to understand the complex trade-offs between solutions. We must look at the complete cost of solutions over their lifetimes and all the aspects of the impacts, not just climate change. This is the challenge for scientists and engineers as well as policymakers, and we must take a much more multidisciplinary approach.

This talk will provide a brief introduction to climate modelling and future challenges. These span science, technology, policy and will embrace new ways of working. Examples include:

1. The complex linkages between problems, e.g. Air quality and climate change, food supply and biofuels,  
2. Improvements in technology and data science allowing innovation in usability and availability of data
3. The breakdown in the exponential growth of computing power (Moores law).