If you were responsible for allocating climate research funding, what would you most like to see studied?

There is so much about how our climate system works that we don’t understand adequately. If you were allocating climate research funding, what aspects would you most like to see studied further?

Here are a few ideas for starters.

1. What causes PDO, ENSO etc to switch phase?

2. The role of clouds:
- trends in global cloudiness, long term climate impacts of increased/decreased cloudiness,
- What causes regional changes in cloud cover.

3. Non-terrestrial climate controls.
- How the sun (not TSI) influences our climate; magnetic field, solar wind, etc
- GCR’s and cloud formation,
- Gravitational influences of the Sun, Moon and Planets.

4. Quantification of the total climate system heat content and energy movements.
- What’s actually happening re the whole oceans’ total heat content?
- How does the energy captured by greenhouse gasses propogate around the whole globe.

What would you like to see studied further?

What do we need to know (that we don't currently know) in order to properly understand how anthropogenic GHG emissions will change our climate?

2011-09-21T03:41:18Z

Edit Dawei: Re gravitational influences. I wasn't thinking of the Milankovitch cycles, rather the significance of the relative positions of the sun and planets. The centre of mass of the Solar System is not stationary, it moves around depending on where the planets all are at any given time. I read an interesting study linking the position of the centre of mass of the Solar system to the likelihood of a phase change in the PDO. There appears to be some kind of relationship that's beyond co-incidental.

Edit AMP. "climatic effects on weather trends" would be really good. It would allow us to distinguish weather from climate change. Currently we can't tell if a significant weather event is just an unusual event or if it occurred as a consequence of climate change.
Re the deep ocean heat content, I agree completely. We are currently simply postulating on this and we don't need to. This is something we can measure directly. It seems incredible that we don't have a detailed understanding of

2011-09-21T13:15:08Z

of what is happening in our largest and most important heat sink. I believe the pertinent word is 'travesty'.

Edit Pegminer. A dense network of automated met stations would help a huge amount. It would be cheap to do in comparison to the Argo deployment. This network would have enormous benefits for maritime safety, population safety and agriculture as well as what it would contribute to our understanding of climate. Personally, I’m very keen on ‘measurements’. We need reliable data to build and prove effective geographic models (my area of expertise), and currently have very limited useable ocean data. The major issues with ocean based data are that sample times, sample density and sample locations are extremely variable. It is virtually impossible to build a useful, continuous model over huge ocean expanses with the current data. A network of floating observation points would overcome that.

A Modest Proposal2011-09-20T16:39:11Z

Favorite Answer

Oh, there are several areas I think could be improved. Your list is good, to add another couple:

- aerosol forcing (a terrible shame Glory failed to launch...)
- (really just elaborating on your #4) deep ocean content monitoring

As to which I would prioritize, perhaps whichever contributes the largest uncertainty factor to estimating further climate changes. Aerosols and clouds, in this case.

I would also think that climatic effects on weather trends would be important as well, mainly exactly how we would expect storm frequency to change and the hydrological cycle to change as well. Knowing this information could greatly help us in adapting to climate change.

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pegminer2011-09-21T00:11:27Z

I'm biased, because it's my area of research, but I think GPS meteorology provides a lot of bang for the buck. I'd love to see a dense network of GPS receivers established around the world, and mounted on buoys in the oceans. This would not only give us (eventually) information about how the distribution of water vapor throughout the atmosphere is changing, if the data could be accessed in real-time it would greatly improve numerical weather forecast models. These same sensors (at least the ground-based ones) can be used for real-time earthquake warnings and studies of plate motion.

Additionally GPS radio occultation should eventually provide an independent and accurate measure of global temperature.

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David2011-09-20T23:34:02Z

Not sure if this counts under 'climate', but if it does then I would say the theory of glacial movement and current state of glaciers in major areas like Greenland.

Gravitational influences sounds interesting too. I'm assuming you are referring to Milankovic cycles, but it would be interesting if there were other effects caused by gravitational anomalies, even if they are only small effects.

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Ottawa Mike2011-09-21T03:28:39Z

2. The role of clouds.

If we truly understand the nature of clouds as a forcing or feedback (or both?), we could more accurately assess climate sensitivity to increased CO2. To me, that's the most important question.

As well, I would allocate money to the study of cloud formation which is part of the role of clouds with cosmic rays as a factor as well as relative humidity. As a matter of fact, studying the entire evaporation, precipitation and cloud formation cycle would be the overall goal.

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Matt2011-09-21T06:15:47Z

Like the GPS meteorologist before me, I admit bias (I'm in environmental health).

I would research ways to control the spread of tropical parasites and disease due to global warming. Maybe study whether fast-tracking eradication of tropical diseases we're already close to eradicating, like guinea worm disease, before they potentially spread from global warming, might save money in the long run.

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