Climate research investigates the structure and dynamics of Earth’s climate system, analyzing global and regional weather patterns. Its findings inform international policy-making aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change.
In recent decades, there has been a clear link between human activities such as deforestation and fossil fuel consumption, and rising global temperatures. PNNL scientists contribute to understanding these trends through various research methodologies, including atmospheric science, oceanography and geology. These disciplines work together to provide a holistic view of Earth’s climate systems and the interconnected processes that affect them.
The field of climate science, which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century (though it shares a name with the earlier climatology), combines observations and theory to describe and predict the long-term evolution of global, regional and local climates. It uses data from a variety of sources, such as ground stations and ships on the surface of the water, airplanes in flight, satellites orbiting Earth, drills into ancient ice at the poles, tree rings, ocean sediments and historical records. It also employs complex computer models to simulate the large-scale motions that transport heat, moisture and other quantities that shape paradigmatic climate variables such as average temperature and precipitation rates.
Researchers are increasingly able to quantify how much particular extreme weather events, such as floods or heat waves, have been made more likely or intense by increasing greenhouse gas levels. This is called probabilistic event attribution. Other research aims to understand how climate changes impact interlinked ecosystems. For example, changes in optimum habitat temperatures can accelerate biodiversity loss and, through the spread of pathogens such as the coronavirus, increase the incidence of food and water-borne diseases.