Courses / Module

This module deals with key issues in climate science and in linking climate science with policy. The quality of climate time series underpins climate science, process understanding and making properly informed decisions. The module will introduce students to approaches to homogenising (quality assuring) climate data series using cutting edge software such as HOMER. Students will gain an appreciation of both the importance and challenges of constructing long term data series and recognise the important contributions that metadata and even citizen scientists make to the homogenisation process. Homogenous data series are important not only for detecting climate change signals but also for attribution. Students will be guided through approaches to detecting and attributing changes in various time series from temperature and precipitation to river flows and will grapple with the associated challenge of attributing detected changes. Finally students will be introduced to contemporary approaches to decision making in linking climate science and policy with a particular focus on water resources and flood management.