Rapid Climate Change (RAPID) was a £20 million, six-year (2001-2007) programme for the Natural Environment Research Council. The programme aimed to improve the ability to quantify the probability and magnitude of future rapid change in climate, with a main (but not exclusive) focus on the role of the Atlantic Ocean's Thermohaline Circulation.

This project analysed the output from state-of-the-art coupled climate models in conjunction with very long instrumental climate data and an extensive archive of annual- and selected decadal-resolution palaeoclimate data to study climate changes during the past millennium. Actual and model-derived synthetic networks of palaeoclimate data have been used to estimate the extent to which (i) variations in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation strength; (ii) variations in the North Atlantic Oscillation; and (iii) the sensitivity of climate to external forcing changes can be reconstructed from different networks of palaeoclimate data, making assumptions about coverage, seasonality of response and reliability of expressed climate signal.