Objectives

Research Questions To Drive The Agenda 

  • Satellite observation requirements for monitoring tipping elements in the Earth System, perturbing factors, and interactions.
  • Processing the data to show proximity to thresholds in the system.
  • Development of risk (and resilience) indicators, grouped by sphere into cryosphere, ocean and biosphere – and their interactions, and how they link into social responses and social tipping point risks.
  • For biosphere: recommendations for ecological indicators of abrupt change and response to disturbance: observation requirements by region/variable/resolutions to observe greening/browning, fire response, vegetation-atmosphere interactions, and drivers of extinction.
  • Cryosphere: prioritisation and recommendations for indicators of abrupt change and the inclusion of cascading impacts in models.
  • Ocean: critical needs for observation of circulation changes, tipping points relating to ocean-atmosphere fluxes, clouds, and their cascading impacts: for example on hypopoxy and CH4 release.
  • System responses to human activity – recommendations for monitoring of tipping elements relating due to land and ocean management.
  • Recommendations for improving our understanding of uncertainties and risk relating to remote sensing of tipping elements, and model-data integration.
  • Improving our understanding of inter-connectedness of climate and human systems.
  • Recommendations for how to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for detecting tipping thresholds and ‘flickering’ in remote sensing data.
  • Research strategies for monitoring unobservable tipping elements through by defining emergent constraints.
  • Defining model-data integration requirements, processing and infrastructure.