Developing an Earth System Emulator

Year
2026
Primary Supervisor
Camilla Mathison
Institution
Possibility of becoming a CASE project
Yes
Collaborative Project
No
Academic Supervisors
Chetan Deva <[email protected]> (University of Leeds, School of Earth and Environment), Emanuel Gloor <[email protected]> (University of Leeds, School of Geography)
Research Themes
,
Project Partners
Met Office
Research Keywords
, , ,
Relevant Degree Courses
,

At the Met Office, we are developing an Earth System Emulator called PRIME (Mathison et al., 2025), which stands for Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions. PRIME is designed to emulate CMIP6 Earth System Models for a given emissions scenario—without needing to run that scenario directly within the CMIP6 framework.

PRIME currently uses well-established methods to generate temperature distributions via the FaIR simple climate model. These temperature outputs are then used to scale monthly climate patterns from CMIP6. The scaled patterns are downscaled to hourly resolution to produce driving data for all eight input variables required by the JULES land surface model:

  • near-surface air temperature
  • diurnal temperature range
  • precipitation
  • shortwave radiation
  • longwave radiation
  • near-surface specific humidity
  • 10 m wind speed
  • surface pressure

Some variables, such as shortwave radiation, do not scale well with temperature. As part of this project, we aim to improve the representation of these variables in PRIME, potentially by exploring machine learning approaches.

The project will focus on incorporating global land-use change and land-atmosphere interactions into this simplified framework—for example, capturing drying trends linked to deforestation. This PhD will build on the CSSP Brazil-funded project LURE, led by one of the co-supervisors at the University of Leeds.

References

Mathison et al. (2025): https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/18/1785/2025/index.html