Southampton scientists and computer engineers have developed an interactive climate app that can fit in your pocket and help you to gauge the future effects of carbon emissions around key sensitivities of the Earth’s climate.
The new app, CO2 Modeller, provides an interactive tool to allow anyone to explore for themselves the implications of delaying emission reductions on their tablet or smartphone.
Using an easy-to-follow touchscreen, users can review how carbon emission targets and outcomes will impact four key areas of climate change – future global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification and CO2 concentration – over the next 85 years.
“The projections offered through CO2 Modeller are similar to those from state-of-the-art climate models, because we have fed in a range of climate sensitivities calculated by those models into the app,” said Dr Philip Goodwin, Lecturer in Ocean and Earth Science and one of the app’s developers.
“But the app is super-fast thanks to a theoretical breakthrough; once you set your chosen carbon emission target, CO2 Modeller performs 1,000 independent simulations in around a second and gives you a range of future projections, indicating their uncertainty, allowing you to see how different emissions pathways will lead to different climate outcomes over our lifetime.”
