Predictability of Climate Tipping Focusing on Internal Variability in the Earth System

Despite many efforts to predict the existence and timing of climate tipping under specific climate scenarios, the practical predictability of climate tipping, the necessary conditions under which climate tipping can be predicted, has yet to be explored. Here we examine the predictability of climate tipping using an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE), in which the value of observation for prediction is assessed through idealized data assimilation experiments. A simplified dynamic vegetation model and an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation two‐box model are used for the OSSE. We find that the ratio of internal variability to observation error, or signal‐to‐noise ratio, should be large enough to resolve internal variability; observations with a large signal‐to‐noise ratio can help improve model‐based prediction of climate tipping. The simple heuristic scaling based on our results implies that existing observation networks may not be precise enough to predict climate tipping.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Geophysical Research Letters

• Publication date

  2025-06-10

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1029/2024GL113146
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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