Gregory Munday: Publications

Advancing ProFSea: a spatially-resolved sea-level change emulator for long-term impacts 

(2025)

Authors:

Gregory Munday, Matthew Palmer, Rachel Perks, Lesley Allison, Jennifer Weeks, Chris Smith, Jonathan Gregory

Abstract:

Sea-level rise simulation has previously been limited to Earth system models and global emulators - restricting spatially-resolved sea-level projections to those based on ageing emissions pathways with inflexible and expensive frameworks for updating projections using the latest scenarios. The ProFSea (Projecting Future Sea-level) tool improved on AR5 methods for fast regional sea-level prediction, but was limited to RCP scenarios and a 21st century timescale. We use the FaIR simple climate model to generate an ensemble of global surface temperatures from a range of policy-relevant scenarios, and drive a global sea-level rise simulator. The global projections are then localised using spatial patterns (derived from model estimates and observational evidence) related to key sea-level change drivers. Uncertainty is quantified and propagated throughout the modelling chain. We present the evaluation of this enhanced version of the ProFSea sea-level projections tool, and demonstrate its utility as a policy tool for predicting local sea-level change risk through the 21st century, out to 2300.

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Northern high latitude ecosystem carbon balance under climate change

(2025)

Authors:

Eleanor Burke, Rebecca Varney, Daniel Hooke, Norman Steinert, Luke Smallman, Chris Jones, Gregory Munday, Camilla Mathison

Abstract:

Recent studies suggest that the northern terrestrial permafrost region was a weak CO2 sink during the period 2000-2020. Future model projections remain highly uncertain – will the region remain a sink or become a source of CO2? And, if it becomes a source, when? Here we use a novel probabilistic framework PRIME (Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions) constrained with observations to quantify a range of plausible pathways. Included are uncertainties in the global temperature response to emissions which are combined with uncertainties in spatial climate response to the global temperature change. This information is used to provide driving data for a range of JULES (the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator) configurations all of which include a representation of permafrost carbon to investigate the ecosystem carbon balance in the northern high latitudes.

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Progress developing the PRIME framework and using it in FASTMIP. 

(2025)

Authors:

Camilla Mathison, Eleanor Burke, Gregory Munday, Chris Smith, Chris Jones, Chris Huntingford, Andy Wiltshire, Eszter Kovacs, Norman Steinert, Rebecca Varney, Laila Gohar, Michael Windisch, Yann Quilcaille, Sonia Seneviratne, Daniel Hooke

Abstract:

Regionalized climate risk assessments are crucial for understanding impacts on ecosystems and society, and to allow planning for climate change. While existing Earth System Models (ESMs) provide a framework for such assessments, they often lack the critical processes simulated by dedicated Impact Models. However, Impact Models are often driven by output data from ESMs, which may need bias-correcting, and therefore, there is a significant time lag in the modelling chain. Furthermore, reliance on existing ESM data for Impact Models limits our analysis to the handful of scenarios (i.e. SSPs) and models that ran them (an “ensemble of opportunity” bias), while there is a need for multiple model simulations to try to capture uncertainty in future climate.Over the last few years, we have developed the PRIME framework for producing scenarios of regional impacts for user-prescribed future emissions scenarios. PRIME combines global mean temperature and CO2 concentrations from the emissions driven FaIR simple climate model, as used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, with patterns of climate change from CMIP6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6) Earth System models to drive the JULES land surface model. This modelling framework projects regional changes to the land surface and carbon cycle. We will describe PRIME for the benefit of a new audience and demonstrate how this powerful and flexible approach answers questions on regional impacts using a range of scenarios. We will also talk about the FASTMIP modelling activity led by ETH Zurich with strong contributions of the UK metoffice and PNNL, which aims to provide a coordinated experiment of regional emulators for a wide range of scenarios. We will discuss how these systems tend to be flexible and fast to run and therefore represent a wealth of future development opportunities. In particular we will focus on how PRIME and similar frameworks will enable rapid probabilistic assessment of novel scenarios emissions scenarios that have not yet been run in ESMs thereby providing a useful insight and the capability to quantify societally-relevant climate impacts.

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Negative AMOC tipping feedback on permafrost carbon in climate mitigation scenarios 

(2025)

Authors:

Norman Julius Steinert, Eleanor Burke, Jörg Schwinger, Biqing Zhu, Thomas Gasser, Gregory Munday, Camilla Mathison, Hanna Lee

Abstract:

Recently, Wunderling et al., (2024) reviewed the current knowledge on climate tipping interactions and cascades, which highlighted lacking knowledge on the interaction between the AMOC and northern high-latitude permafrost carbon loss – labeled with ‘very limited/missing evidence’ for their interaction strength and direction. Here, we investigate the response of permafrost-carbon to idealized climate stabilization and overshoot scenarios with different modeling approaches ranging from complex to simplified Earth system models (ESM, LSM and SCM). Net warming in these mitigation scenarios results in irreversible loss of soil carbon from permafrost regions, even after achieving net-zero emissions. However, Northern Hemisphere regional cooling from a temporary slowdown or collapse of the AMOC partially negates the release of permafrost carbon. Our modeling approach allows for the first time to illustrate and quantify a stabilizing negative feedback loop between the AMOC and permafrost, whose effectiveness ranges between 30-60% of permafrost carbon loss reduction if the critical temperature for AMOC tipping is crossed.[Wunderling, N., von der Heydt, A. S., Aksenov, Y., Barker, S., Bastiaansen, R., Brovkin, V., Brunetti, M., Couplet, V., Kleinen, T., Lear, C. H., Lohmann, J., Roman-Cuesta, R. M., Sinet, S., Swingedouw, D., Winkelmann, R., Anand, P., Barichivich, J., Bathiany, S., Baudena, M., Bruun, J. T., Chiessi, C. M., Coxall, H. K., Docquier, D., Donges, J. F., Falkena, S. K. J., Klose, A. K., Obura, D., Rocha, J., Rynders, S., Steinert, N. J., and Willeit, M.: Climate tipping point interactions and cascades: a review, Earth Syst. Dynam., 15, 41–74, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-41-2024, 2024.]

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A rapid-application emissions-to-impacts tool for scenario assessment: Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions (PRIME)

Geoscientific Model Development Copernicus GmbH 18:5 (2025) 1785-1808

Authors:

Camilla Mathison, Eleanor J Burke, Gregory Munday, Chris D Jones, Chris J Smith, Norman J Steinert, Andy J Wiltshire, Chris Huntingford, Eszter Kovacs, Laila K Gohar, Rebecca M Varney, Douglas McNeall

Abstract:

Climate policies evolve quickly, and new scenarios designed around these policies are used to illustrate how they impact global mean temperatures using simple climate models (or climate emulators). Simple climate models are extremely efficient, although some can only provide global estimates of climate metrics such as mean surface temperature, CO 2 concentration and effective radiative forcing. Within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) framework, understanding of the regional impacts of scenarios that include the most recent science is needed to allow targeted policy decisions to be made quickly. To address this, we present PRIME (Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions), a new flexible probabilistic framework which aims to provide an efficient mechanism to run new scenarios without the significant overheads of larger, more complex Earth system models (ESMs). PRIME provides the capability to include features of the most recent ESM projections, science and scenarios to run ensemble simulations on multi-centennial timescales and include analyses of many key variables that are relevant and important for impact assessments. We use a simple climate model to provide the global temperature response to emissions scenarios. These estimated temperatures are used to scale monthly mean patterns from a large number of CMIP6 ESMs. These patterns provide the inputs to a “weather generator” algorithm and a land surface model. The PRIME system thus generates an end-to-end estimate of the land surface impacts from the emissions scenarios. We test PRIME using known scenarios in the form of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), to demonstrate that our model reproduces the ESM climate responses to these scenarios. We show results for a range of scenarios: the SSP5–8.5 high-emissions scenario was used to define the patterns, and SSP1–2.6, a mitigation scenario with low emissions, and SSP5–3.4-OS, an overshoot scenario, were used as verification data. PRIME correctly represents the climate response (and spread) for these known scenarios, which gives us confidence our simulation framework will be useful for rapidly providing probabilistic spatially resolved information for novel climate scenarios, thereby substantially reducing the time between new scenarios being released and the availability of regional impact information.

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Advancing ProFSea: a spatially-resolved sea-level change emulator for long-term impacts

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Northern high latitude ecosystem carbon balance under climate change

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Progress developing the PRIME framework and using it in FASTMIP.

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Negative AMOC tipping feedback on permafrost carbon in climate mitigation scenarios

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A rapid-application emissions-to-impacts tool for scenario assessment: Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions (PRIME)

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Gregory Munday

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Advancing ProFSea: a spatially-resolved sea-level change emulator for long-term impacts&#160;

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Northern high latitude ecosystem carbon balance under climate change

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Abstract:

Progress developing the PRIME framework and using it in FASTMIP.&#160;

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Negative AMOC tipping feedback on permafrost carbon in climate mitigation scenarios&#160;

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Abstract:

A rapid-application emissions-to-impacts tool for scenario assessment: Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions (PRIME)

Authors:

Abstract:

Advancing ProFSea: a spatially-resolved sea-level change emulator for long-term impacts

Progress developing the PRIME framework and using it in FASTMIP.

Negative AMOC tipping feedback on permafrost carbon in climate mitigation scenarios