O=C=O<p>Regional climate signals pose new challenges for climate science</p><p><a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/ClimateScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateScience</span></a> has correctly predicted many aspects of the <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/climate" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>climate</span></a> system and its response to increased atmospheric <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/CarbonDioxide" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CarbonDioxide</span></a> concentrations. Recently, discrepancies between the real world and our expectations of regional climate changes have emerged, as have disruptive new computational approaches.</p><p>What the authors describe as the dominant paradigm or "standard approach" of climate science has been developed over the last 60 years by applying fundamental laws of <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/physics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>physics</span></a> to the climate system under the assumption that small-scale processes are determined by statistical averages dependent on large scales (parameterization).</p><p>As with the evolution of other scientific fields, discrepancies have emerged in climate science with respect to how regional <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/ClimateChange" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateChange</span></a> is evolving. For example, the eastern Tropical <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/Pacific" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Pacific</span></a> has cooled contrary to all model predictions. Neither was the increased frequency of blocking weather conditions over <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/Greenland" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greenland</span></a> in summer anticipated.</p><p>In particular, discrepancies are accumulating in the tropics where changes in the large-scale tropical circulation are known to grow out of instabilities that occur at small and intermediate scales. These scale-coupling mechanisms do not operate in the current generation of <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/ClimateModels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateModels</span></a>.</p><p>"The challenge for conceptual work will be to identify which physics missing from the standard approach is most important for regional changes, and how to incorporate it," says Stevens.</p><p><a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-03-regional-climate-pose-science.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">phys.org/news/2025-03-regional</span><span class="invisible">-climate-pose-science.html</span></a></p>