Champion league of climate research

The Bjerknes Centre has Northern Europe's largest academic environment for scientific research on the greenhouse effect and man-made climate change. It is based in Bergen and is a collaboration between the University of Bergen, the research institute NORCE, the Institute of Marine Research and the Nansen Centre for Environment and Remote Sensing, NERSC.

The Bjerknes Centre was established in 2000 on the initiative of an interdisciplinary environment in Bergen, with Professor of Palaeoclimate Eystein Jansen as the driving force. It was among the first 13 Centres of Excellence (CoE) established by the Research Council in 2002 to stimulate the development of top-level research environments in research fields where Norway has particular advantages and prerequisites. The idea is that the best researchers in their fields from different institutions, with long-term, good funding, can collaborate closely and achieve even better results than the institutions individually. Thus, they can play a leading role internationally.

In just a few years, the Bjerknes Centre established itself in the master league of climate research.  

Attracting the best

Outstanding academic environments attract top researchers to the Bjerknes Centre from many countries. The centre has a prominent international position in polar, ocean and climate research. The academic staff consists of close to 300 researchers and students from over 40 countries. They have a professional background in meteorology, oceanography, geology, physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics.

The Bjerknes Centre is named after Vilhelm Bjerknes and his son Jacob Bjerknes, both of whom made important contributions to the development of meteorology and oceanography – the study of the sea and ocean currents. The physicist and meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes is considered the founder of modern meteorology. He came to Bergen in 1917, and the Bergen School of meteorology became world-famous for the development of weather forecasting and theories of low pressure and fronts.

Meteorology and oceanography – the study of the ocean and ocean currents – are important disciplines in climate research. Climate research is interdisciplinary to provide insight into how the air and the ocean interact, how the climate system works and has changed in the past, present and future.

What is climate?

Climate is the sum of the typical weather in a place over a long period of time. The climate of a place says little about what the weather will be like there on a given day. On the other hand, the climate says something about what kind of weather is typical for the place. In short, we dress for the weather, but we build houses for the climate.

Since 1850, the global average temperature has increased by about 1.2 degrees. The extra heat is driving regional climate change and intensifying heavy rainfall and droughts. Human activity and greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of the global temperature increase.

Climate research is important for meeting the challenges posed by climate change. Man-made climate change affects Norwegian society both directly and indirectly, through consequences in other countries and our own. Climate research is of great importance to society and requires long-term efforts.

The Bjerknes Centre's expertise ranges from ocean currents, sea ice and glaciers and extreme weather and CCS uptake in the ocean. Some of the most important areas of research are:

• Ancient climate: The centre reconstructs the Earth's climate history using climate archives in sediments deposited on the seabed and in lakes, drill cores from the ice sheet and stalactites.
• Climate modelling and observations: The centre combines theory and observations to understand the climate system. Scientists develop and improve climate models to predict future climate change.
• Extreme weather and climate adaptation: The researchers at the centre study extreme weather such as heat waves, floods and droughts. They examine how climate change affects such events and how society can be adapted to meet change.
• Glaciers and sea level rise: The researchers analyse glaciers and the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, in order to calculate how much the sea will rise as they melt.
• The Gulf Stream and the climate in the North Atlantic: The centre conducts research on the Gulf Stream and its impact on the climate in the North Atlantic. This has a major impact on the weather in Europe and the sea ice in the Arctic.
• CCS uptake in the ocean: The centre's researchers study the role of the ocean in the carbon cycle and how it affects the climate.

Climate models of international importance

At the end of the 1990s, it was necessary to intensify research on climate change in northern latitudes. The climate in Norway was changing due to greenhouse gas emissions, and we lacked knowledge about what drove the changes.

In the early 2000s, researchers at the Bjerknes Centre developed the Bergen Climate Model (BCM), a model that provides insight into the Earth's climate through simulations of the past, present and future climate. It shows how the climate has evolved over several hundred years.

Exactly one hundred years after Vilhelm Bjerknes became professor of mechanics and mathematical physics at what was then Norway's only university, in Kristiania, the Bjerknes Centre entered into a collaboration in 2007 with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and researchers at the University of Oslo. They wanted to develop a new model that would replace the Bergen Climate Model. The new model was named the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) and is a global, highly complex climate model that simulates, among other things, wind, temperature, precipitation, cloud cover in the atmosphere, vegetation on land, currents, temperature and carbon cycles in the ocean, in the air and on land.

NorESM provides important baseline data for UN climate reports on climate variability and change.