Towards annual updating of forced warming to date and constrained climate projections

Abstract

In the context of rapid human-caused climate change, regular updates of the state of knowledge of current and future climate are needed. New statistical methods using observational constraints underpinned estimates of present-day human-induced warming and projected future warming in the most recent IPCC report. As time goes by, and new updated observational records become available, how should estimates of the current and projected human-caused climate change be updated? Here, we use a perfect model framework and show that incorporating observations from every new year in observationally constrained projections improves their accuracy, without causing major year-to-year spurious variability on outcomes. The forced warming estimated for the current year also exhibits high enough stability to be considered as a robust indicator of the state of the climate system.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Ribes, A. Tessiot, O. Forster, P.M. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6078-0171 Gillett, N.P. Masson-Delmotte, V. Rogelj, J. Vautard, R. Walsh, T.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 7 August 2025 Published (online): 17 October 2025 Published: 17 October 2025
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	?? Leeds.RC-FUIN ??
Date Deposited:	20 Jan 2026 16:28
Last Modified:	20 Jan 2026 16:28
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-025-63026-9
Related URLs:	Author Dataset
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Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:236488