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Theory and the future of land-climate science

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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Fig. 1: Simulated climate warming is larger and more uncertain over land.
Fig. 2: Atmospheric dynamics constrain changes in tropical land climate.
Fig. 3: Evapotranspiration inferred from temperature and humidity measurements.
Fig. 4: Stomatal response to increasing CO2 boosts river run-off.

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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Michael P. Byrne

  2. Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Michael P. Byrne

  3. School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gabriele C. Hegerl & Andrew P. Schurer

  4. Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Jacob Scheff

  5. The Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Ori Adam

  6. Department of Geography, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Alexis Berg

  7. Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Michela Biasutti & Justin S. Mankin

  8. Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Simona Bordoni

  9. Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA

    Aiguo Dai

  10. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Ruth Geen

  11. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Matthew Henry & F. Hugo Lambert

  12. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Spencer A. Hill

  13. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Cathy Hohenegger & Luca Schmidt

  14. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Vincent Humphrey

  15. Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Manoj Joshi

  16. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Alexandra G. Konings

  17. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Marysa M. Laguë

  18. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Flavio Lehner & Angeline G. Pendergrass

  19. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Flavio Lehner & Angeline G. Pendergrass

  20. Polar Bears International, Bozeman, MT, USA

    Flavio Lehner

  21. Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Justin S. Mankin

  22. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Kaighin A. McColl

  23. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Kaighin A. McColl

  24. Department of Statistics and Data Science, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Karen A. McKinnon

  25. Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Marianne Pietschnig

  26. Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Marianne Pietschnig

  27. School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    E. Marian Scott

  28. Met Office, Exeter, UK

    David Sexton

  29. Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Steven C. Sherwood

  30. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Lucas R. Vargas Zeppetello

  31. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Yi Zhang

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Contributions

M.P.B., G.C.H. and J.S. wrote the initial draft. All authors contributed to editing and revising the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to
Michael P. Byrne.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Paul Dirmeyer, Kirsten Findell and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Byrne, M.P., Hegerl, G.C., Scheff, J. et al. Theory and the future of land-climate science.
Nat. Geosci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01553-8

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  • Received: 24 July 2023

  • Accepted: 27 August 2024

  • Published: 11 October 2024

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01553-8

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