The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) seeks to address fundamental scientific problems that impede the ability to accurately predict changes in the global environment. CGCS involves faculty, students and staff in the collaborative use of theory and observations to improve understanding of the Earth's basic physical and biogeochemical processes and mechanisms. The center's main foci are global climate processes, climate observations, and past climate variations.
Established in 1990, CGCS fosters cooperative effort in meteorology, oceanography, hydrology, atmospheric sciences, climate physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and satellite remote sensing carried out in the Schools of Science and Engineering. 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 center's research is concentrated on the fundamental components of the global climate machine: convection, atmospheric water vapor, and cloud formation; oceans and ocean-atmosphere coupling; land-surface hydrology and hydrology-vegetation coupling; biogeochemistry of the greenhouse gases and reflective aerosols; and upper atmospheric chemistry and circulation. CGCS also sustains substantial multidisciplinary effort applied to climate-policy research and analysis, and to modeling the evolution of climate over Earth history.
CGCS's Climate Modeling Initiative (CMI) is developing innovative approaches to computation and aims to better understand the limits to climate predictability, and thereby to inform speculations about how climate may change in the future. CMI is designed to contribute to policy studies undertaken by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is a shared effort of CGCS and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. The Joint Program was launched in 1991 to analyze potential anthropogenic global climate change and its social and environmental consequences. The Joint Program involves extensive collaborative efforts among the CGCS and faculty, staff, and student researchers in the departments of Economics and Political Science, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, the Center for International Studies, and the Engineering Systems Division.
Professor Ronald Prinn of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, is the CGCS director. For further information, contact the CGCS office, Room 54-1312, MIT, 617-253-4902, fax 617-253-0354, cgcs@mit.edu.