Projects
Ongoing projects
EMME-CARE
Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East Climate and Atmosphere Research Center (EMME-CARE) at the Cyprus Institute, funded by the EU and the Cyprus government.
The Cyprus Institute is “teaming” with three top European institutions with complementary expertise related to climate and atmospheric environmental research and innovation, who share the vision of a center of excellence of regional relevance and global significance in the EMME region, which has been identified as a global climate change “hot spot”.
https://emme-care.cyi.ac.cy/about/
CATALYSE
Despite clear signs that the impacts of climate change are escalating, the global response has been inadequate. Traditional scientific efforts have fallen short of providing knowledge and tools that have been broadly applied in decision-making, and innovative approaches to knowledge translation are needed. To catalyse climate action in Europe to protect public health, our overarching goal s to provide new knowledge, data, and tools on: i) the relationships between changes in environmental hazards caused by climate change, ecosystems, and human health; ii) the health co-benefits of climate action; iii) the role of health evidence in decision making; and iv) the societal implications of climate change for health systems. This will be achieved through five specific objectives: 1) to develop an integrated indicator framework and repository to track the status of health-relevant outcomes of climate actions; 2) to quantify the health co-benefits and full social and environmental costs and benefits resulting from mitigation measures outside of the health sector; 3) to develop innovative surveillance and forecasting tools that facilitate effective response to environmental health hazards (e.g. heat stress, allergenic pollen) caused by climate change and the design, monitoring and evaluation of interventions to mitigate climate change; 4) to investigate how stakeholders engage with evidence regarding the health impacts of climate change, and to develop strategies and tools to facilitate engagement; and 5) to provide evidence and training on the most effective strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation for health systems, with specific focus on vulnerable populations including those occupationally exposed to hazards induced by climate change. CATALYSE is a powerful, interdisciplinary consortium with a mission to further develop and communicate evidence of the health impacts of climate change and respond to the urgent need for solutions.
FOCI
While overall the global warming with the causes and global processes connected to well mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs), especially CO2, and their impacts on global to continental scales are well understood with a high level of confidence, there are knowledge gaps concerning the impact of many non-CO2 radiative forcers leading to low confidence in the conclusions. This relates mainly to specific anthropogenic and natural precursor emissions of short-lived GHGs and aerosols and their precursors. These gaps and uncertainties also exist in their subsequent effects on atmospheric chemistry and climate, through direct emissions dependent on changes in e.g., agriculture production and technologies based on scenarios for future development as well as feedbacks of global warming on emissions, e.g., permafrost thaw. In addition to the atmospheric radiative forcing (gaseous or aerosols), albedo changes connected to land-use and land-cover can play a role, depending on the adaptation or mitigation measures included in different scenarios. Thus, the main goal of the proposal is to assess the impact of key radiative forcers, where and how they arise, the processes of their impact on the climate system, to find and test an efficient implementation of these processes into global Earth System Models and into Regional Climate Models, and finally to use the tools developed to investigate mitigation and/or adaptation policies incorporated in selected scenarios of future development targetted at Europe and other regions of the world. We will develop new regionally tuned scenarios based on improved emissions to assess the effects of non-CO2 forcers. Mutual interactions of the results and climate services producers and other end-users will provide feedbacks for the specific scenarios preparation and potential application to support the decision making, including climate policy.
https://www.project-foci.eu/wp/
Former projects
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS42) (2016-2019)
The project focus on the development of gas-phase chemistry module withing the IFS (Integrated Forecasting System) model at the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), named C-IFS. In addition to support upgrades to the C-IFS operational atmospheric chemistry analyses and forecasts, CAMS42 provides three operational functioning C-IFS variants for atmospheric chemistry: CB05BASCOE, MOZART and MOCAGE. Our group is involved with the evaluation and improvement of the chemical mechanisms implemented in the C-IFS.
PalMod – From the Last Interglacial to the Anthropocene – Modelling a Complete Glacial Cycle (Phases I & II)
The German Climate Modelling Initiative – PalMod – is the project which aims for a better understanding of how slow feedbacks in the Earth system operate. Using the new insights into Earth system dynamics, PalMod will deliver projections of the future climate over the next few millennia. Using the last glacial cycle as example, PalMod will identify and constrain interactions between climate change, ice-sheet response (sea-level), and biogeochemical cycling, all of which ultimately determine the Earth system sensitivity.The contribution of MPI-C to PalMod (within the biogeochemical system workgroup, WG2) consists of comprehensive atmospheric physicochemical state estimates using the EMAC model, covering periods from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Present Day. Novel transient estimates of atmospheric oxidative capacity (i.e. tropospheric hydroxyl and ozone burdens), methane (CH4) lifetime variations in connection to changes in reactive carbon and nitrogen compounds are obtained in the Phase I of the project. Phase II is focussed on future projections of the atmospheric state and CH4 turnover in the warming climate and research on novel proxies on past atmospheric states. In particular, we use the clumped isotope composition of air O2 (Δ36) to provide to date the most consistent explanation of the evolution of atmospheric ozone and methane during the Holocene, including the hypothesis of the Holocene thermal optimum.