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What are the spatial and temporal characteristics of natural climate variability?
Posted on August 14th, 2009Categorized as Climate, Earth System Tagged as climate change, climate model, natural variability
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The climate system exhibits internal variability on a broad range of timescales. However, the observational record is short, and the understanding of climate variability on decadal timescales and longer is therefore limited.
The detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change requires a complete understanding of the spatial and temporal characteristics of natural climate variability. Furthermore, without such an understanding, we are not able to evaluate the ability of climate models to simulate past and present variability. This limits our confidence in the ability of the models to simulate future climate variability and change.
A critical focus of Earth system research over the coming decade should therefore be on combining observational and palaeoclimatic data to reconstruct natural climate variability over recent centuries and millennia.
