Abstract
Climate over land—where humans live and the majority of food is produced—is changing rapidly, driving severe impacts through extreme heat, wildfires, drought and flooding. Our ability to monitor and model this changing climate is being transformed through new observational systems and increasingly complex Earth system models. But fundamental understanding of the processes governing land climate has not kept pace, weakening our ability to interpret and utilize data from these advanced tools. Here we argue that for land-climate science to accelerate forwards, an alternative approach is needed. We advocate a parallel scientific effort, one emphasizing robust theories, that aims to inspire current and future land-climate scientists to better comprehend the processes governing land climate, its variability and extremes and its sensitivity to global warming. Such an effort, we believe, is essential to better understand the risks people face, where they live, in an era of climate change.
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Data availability
The model data used to produce Fig. 1 are provided by the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling and can be accessed at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/.
Code availability
The code used to produce Fig. 1 is available from the corresponding author on request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for generously funding a workshop on land-climate science at the University of St Andrews (6–8 June 2022), which inspired this Perspective. We also thank M. Gomis for graphical assistance with Figs. 2–4. M.P.B. was supported by the UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee scheme (grant number EP/Y027868/1), S.A.H. was funded by NSF award no. 2123327 and A.D. was funded by NSF award no. AGS-2015780.
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Byrne, M.P., Hegerl, G.C., Scheff, J. et al. Theory and the future of land-climate science. Nat. Geosci. 17, 1079–1086 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01553-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01553-8
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