Modeling
Climate calculations
About the Research Group
Climate models are indispensable tools when studying past, present and future climate. Using models we can explore complex processes and develop climate projections for the future.
At the Bjerknes Centre modelling has been a core activity since the very beginning.
Climate models can be seen as laboratories for digital experiments. Such experiments may involve estimating future climate given changes in CO2 emissions, increasing the temperature by five degrees to see how much it would rain, or exploring how sea ice loss affects currents.
NorESM - Norwegian Earth System Model
NorESM is a global model, containing the atmosphere, continents, oceans and ice caps, as well as vegetation and other elements of the carbon cycle.
Through the national infrastructure project INES, the Bjerknes Centre and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute share the main responsibility for developing and running NorESM. The results contribute to IPCC reports, and are applied by scientists around the globe.
We also develop and use other models:
- Regional models providing more details of climate in e.g. Norway or Europe
- Ice cap models, used to explore ice melt in Greenland or Antarctica.
- Simpler models used to study specific processes in the ocean, the atmosphere or ecosystems.
At the website Explore the Earth System you can learn about climate models and how scientists use them in their work.
Coordinator
Mats Bentsen
Forsker II / Researcher II - Global Climate, NORCE
Related Articles
See all
New Model Show the Future of Floods in Bergen
What can pollen tell us about the wind?
Sea ice influences East Asian winter cold
Strategic projects
Proxy assimilation for reconstructing climate and improving model
The main objective of PARCIM is to create the first online millennium-long paleo-climate reanalysis, using modern data assimilation, model, and wealth of paleo-proxy archives.
Read more about this climate reconstruction here.
Dynamics of the North Atlantic surface and overturning circulation
The circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean is changing. One notable expression of these changes is a regional cooling that is in striking contrast to the global trend; the ‘warming hole’. While the similarity between this cooling and the fingerprint of a weakening circulation in climate models has been used to argue that the decline in circulation present in virtually all simulations of future climate is already underway, this interpretation is controversial and recent observations call the hypothesized mechanism into question.
We will analyze coupled climate models to clarify how currents and other features of the North Atlantic Ocean interact.