Fifty years of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has been at the forefront of environmental science since it was founded in 1972.

CRU was founded in 1972 by Prof Hubert Lamb, with the aim of establishing climate change records “over as much of the world as possible, as far back in time as was feasible.” At the time, the assumption was that CRU might exist for only a decade before the research was wound down or taken up elsewhere. But the realisation - partly due to CRU’s findings at the end of that decade that human-caused climate change was becoming a global concern led instead to an expansion of the unit. Its scope expanded from establishing historical changes to developing modern datasets that could be used to detect whether human influence could already be seen in the patterns of changing climate.

CRU celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and its mission is as clear as ever: to improve understanding of how and why our climate changes, using machine learning, statistical, and physics-based models to make better predictions of future warming. CRU’s work also helps to make sense of, and reduce, uncertainty in the climate data used to determine worldwide environmental policies.

As well as being a leading institution in climate science, CRU is also a supportive and active community of academics and students. Some of CRU’s past and present staff and students reflect on their experiences working at the ground-breaking organisation:

Jean Palutikof, Professor in Climate Change, Griffith University, Australia

What were you working on in CRU?

When I first joined, we looked at the relationship between the current climate and variations in industrial production and tourist activity. I also worked with Clare Goodess, Senior Research Fellow, School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, on nuclear waste disposal and longterm variations of groundwater movement. We looked at very long-term variations and the occurrence of ice-ages because those are timescales that are of interest for the nuclear waste industry.

The work that was done for the US Department of Energy was fundamental, foundational, and very important.

It reflects the way in which the United States funded research, which is something that hasn’t really impacted elsewhere. If researchers demonstrated value, their research would continue to be funded over the long term. This allowed Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, and others in CRU to go on to do something of extraordinary value.

How do you think CRU’s work has impacted our understanding of climate change?

The global temperature record is embedded nowevery year the series is updated and every year people make statements like “this is the fourth warmest year on record.” The fact that it has become something watched, continually updated, and continually reported on every year is important, because it focuses everyone’s mind on what’s happening.

Manoj Joshi, Professor of Climate Dynamics, UEA

What do you work on in CRU?

I work on climate dynamics and climate modelling, ie. how we understand the physical climate and how it may change in the future. If we want to understand what’s happening in the future, then we must combine observations, theories, and model projections.

That’s what CRU works on: building up a more complete picture of the climate, what it did in the past, and what it’s going do in the future.

CRU translates this into useful information, for example, anticipated sea level rise around Norfolk, or how many days above a certain rainfall threshold are we going to get?”

How collaborative an environment is it?

CRU, the School of Environmental Sciences, and the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences are collaborative. I think in an area like ours you must collaborate with other people - the modellers must collaborate with the people doing the observations and vice versa because that’s how you build up your best understanding.

Climate change is now robustly observed and understood at the global scale and has become established as the defining issue of our time. CRU’s future research focus is on providing the knowledge, and the underpinning scientific understanding, that society needs for developing its response to climate change.

Wilson Kemsley PhD researcher at CRU 2018-2022, currently a Senior Research Associate at CRU

What do you work on in CRU?

My research addresses climate uncertainty. I developed a tool during my PhD that helps our understanding of changes in weather in response to different climate scenarios. I now work with Peer Nowak, Lecturer in Atmospheric Chemistry and Data Science at UEA, looking at using machine-learning techniques to constrain cloud feedback projections.

What impact do you think CRU has had on global efforts to halt it climate change?

Members of staff, both previous and present, have had a lot of impact working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as producing the global temperature record, which is used by scientists all round the world.