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Media enquiries
For the past 50 years scientists from the Climatic Research Unit have featured in the international media highlighting the latest scientific developments in the field of climate change. Please direct all media enquiries to the UEA media centre.
News and events
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CRU at the Norwich Science Festival
Read moreFebruary 2025
Meet the artist and the scientists behind the impressive science-in-art treasure, Climate Mural for our Times, hidden inside Norwich's City Hall. Free, no booking required. Thursday 20 February at 11am and again at 5.30pm.
2024: a record-breaking watershed year for the global climate
Read moreJanuary 2025
The global average temperature for 2024 was 1.53±0.08°C above the 1850-1900 global average, according to the HadCRUT5 temperature series, collated by the Met Office, the University of East Anglia and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science.
Professor Phil Jones awarded an OBE
Read moreJanuary 2025
Many congratulations to Professor Phil Jones, emeritus professor in the School of Environmental Sciences and former director of the Climatic Research Unit. Phil has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to climatology, in the 2025 New Year's Honours list.
Interactive Atlas on each country's contribution to climate change now available
Access the Country Contributions Atlas from the CRU Data pageDecember 2024
How do we know who contributed what to climate change? Our research to quantify the contributions to observed global warming from each country's greenhouse gas emissions has been put into an interactive atlas so you can explore contributions from each country.
Revised historical record sharpens perspective on global warming
Read moreNovember 2024
In the 100th piece published by Climatic Research Unit authors since CRU was founded in 1972, Tim Osborn and John Kennedy provide context for recent research that suggests that early 20th century global warming was much weaker than most datasets show.
Interactive Wildfire Atlas now available
Access the Wildfire Atlas from the CRU Data pageAugust 2024
Matt Jones and Esther Brambleby published our interactive wildfire atlas to coincide with the publication of the inaugural State of Wildfires 2023-2024 report...
UEA academic receives award from the Royal Meteorological Society
Read moreMay 2024
Daniel Skinner, Senior Research Associate based in the Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences has been named the newest recipient of The Malcolm Walker Award for New Environmental...
National Contributions to Warming
Read moreFebruary 2023
Our collaborative research has generated a new database, revealing how countries have contributed to global warming through their emissions of key greenhouse gases since 1850. Read this full article at National Contribution to Warming.
CRU at Norwich Science Festival
February 2023
Tours of the Climate Mural are on 17 February.
As well as this, Emily Wallis and Sarah Wilson Kemsley of CRU are running the “Norwich Climate Explorers” stand on the 17th February. The event takes a look back at Norwich’s historical events, set to the backdrop of the CRU temperature time series, instead of time as the public will be used to. We hope to demonstrate a range of different tools that scientists have used to construct the historical time series (i.e., from thermometers to ice cores). Alongside looking back, we take a look forward. An aerial view of a neighbourhood representing the Norwich of Tomorrow can be built upon by the public using play-doh to envisage a climate-conscious neighbourhood. We are hoping this might look like a neighbourhood filled with play-doh solar panels, trees, and bike lanes; though who knows what creations we might end up seeing. This is all set to a backdrop of the CRU temperature time series, a sample of climate projections, and the climate stripes.
50 Years of UEA's Climatic Research Unit
Read moreMarch 2022
Professor Tim Osborn, Research Director of CRU:
In 2022 we celebrate UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) turning 50! I am looking forward to a diverse range of exciting celebratory events to mark this important year for CRU, which is widely recognised as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of climate change.
Observing and Explaining Climate Change
June 2022
CRU’s work to produce a record of how the world’s temperature was changing began in 1978 and reached a particular milestone with the creation of the first combined land and marine temperature record in 1986 (the precursor to the current HadCRUT dataset). This record demonstrates unequivocally that the globe has warmed since 1850, and provides the basis for research that aims to explain the causes of this warming. CRU started to explore “fingerprint” methods to assess how the observed patterns of climate change match those that can be attributed to particular causes. By the mid-1990s, an international research team, including CRU, was able to detect the fingerprint of human-caused climate change. This finding has been strengthened ever since, as climate change emerges ever more strongly from the background natural variability.
This research meeting will explore the development of global instrumental records of climate change – including, but not limited to, CRU’s seminal contribution – and how they are used in the detection and attribution of climate change. Talks will cover both the earlier developments as well as the state-of-the-art research.
Venue: Thomas Paine Study Centre Lecture Theatre
Date: Tuesday 7 June, 16:00-18:00
Speakers:Phil Jones (Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences,UEA, Norwich, UK)
Dr Kate Willett (Met Office, Exeter, UK)
Ben Santer (Formerly at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA)
Kasia Tokarska (Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Climate Dynamics
June 2022
CRU’s work has always included research into the dynamical processes that govern the expression of climate change on a regional scale and on the hydrological cycle. This aspect has, however, greatly expanded in the last decade of CRU’s 50-year existence, so that it is now a central focus of many of its staff and students. We consider many aspects of climate dynamics, including large-scale climate variability, monsoons, ocean-ice shelf interactions, the role of clouds in amplifying climate change, the warming contrast between land and sea – and even the climates of Earth-like exoplanets.
This research meeting will explore many facets of climate dynamics to which CRU’s research has made significant contributions towards improved understanding. Details TBC.
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2
Date: Tuesday 28 June, 16:30-17:30
Speakers:Dave Thompson (School of Environmental Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK)
Jessica Vial (LMD/IPSL, Paris, France)
Natasha Senior (Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK)
New global temperature visualisations
January 2020
A new set of visualisations of our global temperature datasets are now available, updated each month. They show temperature changes from our HadCRUT4 (land and oceans) and CRUTEM4 (land only) datasets, which we produce in collaboration with the Met Office.
The graphs show global, Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere temperature changes on timescales from years to decades, as well the current year so far.