Study of Earth's Stratosphere Reduces Uncertainty in Future Climate Change

New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) provides more certainty in predicting future climate change, by examining stratospheric water vapour amounts. The research effectively rules out the most extreme scenarios, which imply that water vapour concentrations could increase by more than 25 per cent per degree of global warming. The new approach represents a 50 per cent reduction in the 95th percentile of nclimate model responses.

New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reduces uncertainty in future climate change linked to the stratosphere, with important implications for life on Earth. Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today, but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses. A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to water vapour in the stratosphere, an extremely dry region of the atmosphere 15–50 km above the Earth’s surface.

Future increases in water vapour here risk amplifying climate change and slowing down the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from harmful solar ultraviolet radiation.

Now an international team led by Peer Nowack, until recently a member of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, has developed a new statistical learning approach that combines information from satellite observations with state-of-the-art climate model data to narrow the range of likely future stratospheric water vapour amounts.