Climatic Research Unit

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

With a staff of some thirty research scientists and students, the CRU has contributed to the development of a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including one of the global temperature records used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models.

The CRU was founded in 1972 as part of the university's School of Environmental sciences. The establishment of the Unit owed much to the support of Sir Graham Sutton, a former Director-General of the Meteorological Office, Lord Solly Zuckerman, an adviser to the University, and Professors Keith Clayton and Brian Funnel, Deans of the School of Environmental Sciences in 1971 and 1972. Initial sponsors included British Petroleum, the Nuffield Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell. The Rockefeller Foundation was another early benefactor, and the Wolfson Foundation gave the Unit its current building in 1986. Since the second half of the 1970s the Unit has also received funding through a series of contracts with the United States Department of Energy to support the work of those involved in climate reconstruction and analysis of the effects on climate of greenhouse gas emissions. The UK Government (Margaret Thatcher) became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s.

The first director of the unit was Professor Hubert Lamb, who had previously led research into climatic variation at the Met Office. He was then known as the "ice man" for his prediction of global cooling and a coming ice age but, following the UK's exceptionally hot summer of 1976, he switched to predicting a more imminent global warming. The possibility of major weather changes and flooding attracted attention to the unit and sponsorship by major insurance companies wanting to mitigate their potential losses. Prior to the Unit's establishment, it had widely been believed by the meteorological establishment that the climate was essentially constant and unvarying. Lamb and others in the climatological community had for years argued that the climate system was in fact highly variable on timescales of decades to centuries and longer. The establishment of the CRU enabled Lamb and his colleagues to focus on this issue and eventually to win the argument decisively.

Hubert Lamb retired in 1978. His successors were Tom Wigley (1978–1993), Trevor Davies (1993–1998), Jean Palutikof and Phil Jones (jointly 1998–2004), Phil Jones (2004–2016), and Tim Osborn (from January 2017); Peter Liss was acting director during investigations between December 2009 and July 2010. In 1984, the unit moved to a new cylindrical building designed by Rick Mather. In 2006, this was named the Hubert Lamb Building in honour of the first director.

At the time of its establishment the CRU set out four key aims, which still remain valid:

CRU produces a range of climate datasets, covering temperature, precipitation, pressure and circulation, both global and regional. One of the CRU's most significant products is the CRUTEM global dataset of land near-surface temperature anomalies on a 5° by 5° grid-box basis, which is compiled in conjunction with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and its sea-surface temperature dataset to produce the HadCRUT temperature record. First compiled in the early 1980s, the record documents global temperature fluctuations since the 1850s. The CRU compiles the land component of the record and the Hadley Centre provides the marine component. The merged record is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in all its publications.

Other products include the CRU TS high resolution gridded land surface dataset of multiple factors including precipitation, vapour pressure and cloud cover as well as temperatures. This type of dataset can be used to monitor drought conditions, for example.