Funding for climate tipping point research

Researchers at the University of St Andrews will take part in a multi-million pound project funded by the new UK funding agency, ARIA (Advanced Research and Innovation Agency), under their Forecasting Tipping Points programme.

The project, entitled VERIFY, aims to better observe and understand massive changes in the climate – so-called tipping point events – that took place in the geological past.

Embedded in six institutions across the UK, and with partners in mainland Europe and the USA, VERIFY brings together experts in modern and paleo-climate dynamics, high resolution and complexity modelling, with data scientists and statisticians.

The project will develop Digital Twins of past tipping events – virtual representations of an object or system designed to reflect a physical object accurately – serving as a testbed for verifying whether tipping behaviour can be predicted by Early Warning Systems (EWSs). This will form a crucial component of an £81m ARIA-funded effort to develop these systems in the North Atlantic region.

Through the project, the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the St Andrews will be funded primarily to train and support a PhD student who will investigate the fundamental dynamics at the heart of these past climate changes.

The work of this PhD will form a crucial aspect of the project’s efforts, developing efficient, physically interpretable models of the ocean and climate to interrogate past and future tipping events.

Further details on the PhD, titled “Deciphering the dynamics of abrupt ocean change and climate tipping points”, can be found on the information page.