D4.3. Short report on main outcomes and participating organisations of the workshop on approaches to constraining climate sensitivity and integrating new insights on climate sensitivity

On 30 September 2021, the EU CONSTRAIN project hosted an online workshop “The Role of Climate Model Emulators in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report”. The workshop appraised recent developments in the use of climate model emulators in the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was published on 9 August 2021.

The workshop highlighted the many ways in which climate model emulators contributed to AR6. Some of the notable benefits are:

• Synthesis of multiple lines of evidence and production of 100s of projections central to the assessments of WG1 and WG3.
• Supporting the IPCC’s ambition to produce open science using transparent, accessible models and data.
• Facilitating communication, collaborative working, and consistency between the working groups and between the chapter teams in WG1.

The discussion at the workshop made it clear that emulators offer considerable opportunities to enhance both future climate research and the communication of climate science, in terms of:

• Advancing emulations from global means to regional climate changes, and from changes in climate means to changes in climate extremes.
• Facilitating capacity building, and promoting communication and dialogue about climate science with a wider community of scientists and interested parties such as policymakers and decision makers.

This workshop was dedicated to the early career scientists who made a substantial contribution to the work on emulators in the IPCC AR6.