The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) seeks to better understand the natural mechanisms in ocean, atmosphere, and land systems that together control the Earth's climate, and to apply improved knowledge to problems of predicting climate changes. The center utilizes theory, observations, and numerical models of the Earth's basic physical and biogeochemical processes to investigate climate phenomena, the linkages among them, and their potential feedbacks in a changing climate. The center's main foci are global climate processes, climate observations, and past climate variations.
CGCS was founded in 1990 to foster cooperative effort among faculty, students, and research scientists in meteorology, oceanography, hydrology, atmospheric sciences, climate physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and satellite remote sensing. Participants are drawn primarily from the departments of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Chemistry; Biology; Chemical Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The major research inititatives in CGCS are the MIT Climate Modeling Inititative (CMI), the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Through the latter, CGCS sustains substantial collaborative effort with faculty, students, and researchers in the departments of Economics and Political Science, the Sloan School of Management, the Center for International Studies, and Engineering Systems Division.
CMI is a cooperative enterprise among CGCS scientists to develop a new generation model of the atmosphere, land, and ocean for study of the climate of the Earth. A focus of CMI is the MITcgm, a hydrodynamical model that can be used to study both the atmosphere and ocean. The approach encompasses elements of computational fluid dynamics, statistics, meteorology, oceanography, and computer science, and exploits the latest understanding of geophysical and biogeochemical processes and new developments in algorithms, computing technology, and software design.
AGAGE measures greenhouse gases globally and infers their sources and sinks using inverse methods. It is distinguished by its capability to measure over the globe at high frequency almost all of the important gas species in the Montreal Protocol (e.g., CFCs, HCFCs) to protect the ozone layer and almost all of the significant non-CO2 gases in the Kyoto Protocol (e.g., HFCs, methane, and nitrous oxide) to mitigate climate change.
MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change analyzes potential anthropogenic global climate change and its social and environmental consequences. The Joint Program integrates economics (energy and agriculture), climate and ecosystem dynamics, and biogeochemical cycles to probabilistically project future economic development, climate change, and air pollution under various assumptions regarding technologies and policies. The Joint Program was established in 1991 as a shared effort of the CGCS and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and is a key player in MIT's Energy Inititative.
Professor Ronald Prinn of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences is the CGCS director. Contact the CGCS office at Room 54-1312, 617-253-4902, fax 617-253-0354, cgcs@mit.edu.