In response to the rapid increase in the consumption of fossil fuel, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. It has been projected that the continued increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could have a profound impact upon the climate and ecosystem of our planet and it has become very urgent to investigate this very important problem and to provide reliable assessment of current and future changes in global climate.

The main goal of the research activity of this program is reliable and quantitative projection of global warming. The research consists of three groups. The first group tries to reduce the uncertainty in determining the response of the climate to changes in atmospheric composition such as the changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere, elucidating the physical mechanism of global warming. The second group develops an atmosphere-ocean-land coupled model with high performance through numerical experiments and comparison of the outputs with the observed analyses. The third group explores the physical and chemical mechanisms, which are responsible for the large climactic change of the geological past. It also attempts to evaluate and validate the sensitivity of model climate through paleoclimate simulations. The primary tools of these groups are general circulation models of both the atmosphere and ocean and the coupled atmosphere-ocean-land models.