Research Spotlight
Understanding Climate Variability and Linkages to Mitigation and Adaptation Policy
Research in the Solomon group includes a focus on identifying the signals of anthropogenic climate change that are emerging or will soon emerge from the noise of local variability in some locations, and to understand linkages with mitigation and adaptation policies. Our own recent work and that of others has shown how the signal of human influence on warming is emerging from the noise of internal natural climate fluctuations at local scales. We find the earliest emergence of warming in some parts of the tropics that are subject to low variability (Mahlstein et al., 2011). Indeed, both observations and models suggest that the extremely low interannual variability of climate over much of the maritime tropics implies that even relatively modest human-induced warming emerges earlier there than in other parts of the globe. Together with colleagues, we are currently examining how these may relate to issues such as rainfall availability, crop damage, and the design of effective policies.
