GEOG Associate Research Professor Louise Chini has been named a member of the Climate Forcings Task Team of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a long-term international collaborative effort that brings together scientists from around the world to improve knowledge of climate change. 

The CMIP, a project of the World Climate Research Programme, aims to better understand past, present and future climate changes arising from natural, unforced variability or in response to changes in radiative forcing, by comparing results from multiple different climate models. CMIP results and data are essential to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international and national climate assessments which help to establish climate policy and decision-making. There have been 5 different CMIPs since its inception in 1995, and planning for CMIP7 has now begun with the creation of several task teams.

Chini will serve as a member of the Climate Forcings Task Team, which focuses on the ‘forcings,’ or datasets that climate models use to drive climate change in their simulations. Bringing her expertise in land-use and land cover change (LULCC) data—an important forcing due to the carbon emissions, sinks, and Earth surface property changes associated with LULCC—Chini will help evaluate all forcing datasets that climate models use, determine any issues or coverage gaps, identify needs for the next generation of forcing datasets, and help to develop and use those data in CMIP7.