Dr Chris Smith

Profile

I am a NERC-IIASA Collaborative Research Fellow, splitting my time between ICAS and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria. My research is linking climate modelling to energy supply and energy demand, with the aim of improving the feedbacks between integrated assessment models and climate change. Prior to this I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Physical Climate Change group with main interests in radiative forcing and developing simple climate climate models.

Research interests

Simplifying complex climate models: I am one of the main developers of the FaIR simple climate model, in collaboration with Oxford University. FaIR was used in the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C to provide projections of climate change from hundreds of socioeconomic scenario pathways from integrated assessment models, and will be used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Working Group 3 in a similar fashion. We use simple models for this purpose because full complexity Earth system climate models (e.g. the Met Office’s Hadley Centre Model) are too computationally expensive to run hundreds of scenarios.

Radiative forcing: including an assessment of radiative forcing in the most recent climate models, and provision of radiative kernels from the Met Office’s HadGEM3 and HadGEM2 climate models. I have also contributed to near-real-time radiative forcing estimates from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

I am a chapter scientist and contributing author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report Working Group 1.

Qualifications

• PhD Doctoral Training Centre in Low Carbon Technologies
• MMath Mathematics

Professional memberships

• American Geophysical Union
• European Geosciences Union
• Priestley International Centre for Climate

Student education

I teach the MSc module Climate Change: Physical Science Basis.

Research groups and institutes

• Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science
• Climate Science and Impacts