What are they, and why work on them?
Climate models are state-of-the-art tools for understanding how the Earth system works. They’re also extraordinarily complex, computationally expensive models, which makes some aspects of science difficult, such as exploring different scenarios of climate change or understanding impacts. Climate model emulators are simple versions of climate models that only represent part of the system or represent the system at reduced complexity. By training and calibrating these emulators to represent the more complex Earth system models, we can get rapid climate information, often in a few seconds on a laptop.
