Start date: April 2022
End date: March 2027
CPOM Principal Investigator: Land Ice Modelling Tony Payne is the co-lead WP4: Rapid or irreversible change in the Earth system.
Overview
The TerraFIRMA project is part of NERC’s National Capability research programme and aims to provide novel climate projections that explore the risks and impacts associated with missing global warming targets, assess the reversibility of changes triggered by climate shifts and evaluate leading mitigation strategies aimed at limiting future climate change.
Partners
The TerraFIRMA programme involves eight Centres:
- British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
- British Geological Survey (BGS)
- National Centre for Atmosphere Science (NCAS)
- National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO)
- National Oceanography Centre (NOC)
- Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML)
- UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH)
- Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM)
- Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC)
While the programme will explore the risk of rapid, potentially irreversible changes in key Earth system phenomena, it will also investigate whether climate change effects can be reversed if warming targets are exceeded and then addressed later, documenting the impacts of global change across various scenarios, including mitigation and overshoot situations.
CPOM’s role in TerraFIRMA focuses on modelling and observation of the Antarctic ice sheet and associated projections of sea level, with CPOM’s Professor Antony Payne (University of Liverpool) leading on TerraFirma’s WP4 project focusing on rapid and irreversible change in the Earth system.
