Proposal for personal visit for Professor Piers Forster to CICERO, Oslo

The application is for Prof. Piers Forster, University of Leeds, UK to visit CICERO in Oslo for a six month period in 2014. He is a world leading expert on the mechanisms driving climate change and response to these changes in ensemble of climate models. Piers Forster has worked on radiative forcing of various forcing agents in 2 decades and over the last decade become the leading expert on analysing climate sensitivities from the large climate model output databases, CMIP3 and CMIP5. The aim of the visit for Prof. Piers Forster from University of Leeds is to collaborate and enhance productivity on existing EU and NRC projects, such as ECLIPSE and SLAC. Prof. Piers Forster has had a central role in the previous IPCC fourth assessment report (AR4) publishe d in 2007 and the ongoing fifth assessment report (AR5) to be published in September 2013. Specifically, the main collaboration will focus on research activities on two aspects: a) recent changes in anthropogenic radiative forcing mechanisms over the last two decades important for understanding the weaker temperature trends and climate sensitivity estimates, b) how precipitation respond to various radiative forcing agents.