A New Trend of the Climate Studies

　Teruyuki Nakajima, Director, Center for Climate System Research, The University of Tokyo

　(From the preface for the 2007 CCSR brochure)

　Center for Climate System Research (CCSR) studies the earth's climate formation, change, and its predictability. Being established in 1991, we have made efforts for developing climate models and related researches. Recent years of us are with several important events that indicate an increasing demand of climate model use. In February 2007, the 4th assessment report of IPCC, to which CCSR has contributed significantly, has been released and drawn quite large attention of the public, because the report supported with a high probability that the global warming has happened and is ongoing. Increasing abnormal weather events, shrinking glaciers/sea ice, and other anomalies are said to be related with the global warming phenomenon. Hence demands of the society of using climate models are increasing for assessing these climate change issues accurately. In this regard, a large-scale program of use of the Earth Simulator, the Research Revolution 2002 (RR2002) program, had a large impact on the climate study community to gain a skill of comprehensive climate simulations of the 20th century and 21th centuries. Through the simulations we have shown the mechanism of climate changes, on concrete scientific bases, caused by solar luminosity change, volcanic activity, and emission of anthropogenic matter.

　The RR2002 program has ended in FY2006 and in this year we have started a new research revolution program of climate change prediction as a successor of the RR2002 program. CCSR also made an effort, as a universities cooperative facility, to reinforce the cooperation among research centers by starting from FY2007 a new project of Formation of a virtual laboratory for diagnosing the earth's climate system with climate study-related research centers of Tohoku University, Chiba University, and Nagoya University. And we started a collaboration with the Climate and environment application creation consortium organized by private enterprises.

　The above-mentioned events indicate that we are now in a new era that the climate model is utilized in every application of research and social problems. This era is also called as a Golden period of earth observation, because large amount of data have been derived from earth observation satellites. This concludes that we are in a matured period of climate modeling and earth observation data use. We see, however, new directions of climate studies are surfacing from this matured satge, because of the nature of science that breaks conventional systems to bear new trends. For example, we are in necessity of improving the climate model to be applicable to the new multi-disciplinary science regarding the eco-system and social sciences including human dimension.

　CCSR, as an organization in the university which is a melting pod of knowledge, wants to contribute to grow such new directions. In reality this small-scale university organization has grown a tradition since its establishment in 1991, trying to attack new difficult problems with our faculties and students. We will keep this good spiritual heritage to expand our activity, so that we like to ask your kind supporting us.