The Granularity of Climate Models

American Thinker ^ | March 13, 2010 | Bruce Thompson

[neverdem]

As an engineer schooled in the slide rule era, I have been trying to educate myself about the nature of climate models. The details of the specific construction of the models have been hard to find. I am old enough that I have been through the evolution of computers and calculators from those earliest HP scientific models that cost $400 in 1972 dollars. Computers are not electronic brains, they are just very fast electronic slide rules and adding machines. So I want to figure out the thinking process behind the models.

As a summer intern in the thermodynamics department at Grumman Aerospace, I did computer modeling of the air conditioning system of the A-6E aircraft. Getting that program to run took a lot of debugging, but when it finally started to go, it used 2 minutes of computation time on Grumman's biggest computer before the time allotted to a summer intern expired. They needed that computer for other things, such as landing men on the moon! The summer intern's project would have to wait. But I do have an informed curiosity in the creation of these climate models. It's not a pretty picture.

Now that I have found some of the details, I think I can provide a layman's guide to the developing issues about the models. Much of the current debate centers on the validity of the surface temperature issue.

Historic surface temperature data is maintained by a few government institutions, of which the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) is one. It was the home of the now infamous Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU itself is an offshoot of the British Meteorological Office  (the Met Office). It was formed because weather is not climate and the climatologists felt the need to separate the two. The layman should note that climate models are very different from the weather models that you've seen on TV. Given that the Met Office is the parent, its veiled rebuke of the climatologists at Hadley should be taken very seriously. Their very first recommendation is jaw-dropping

The proposed activity would provide:

1. Verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data at both monthly and finer temporal resolutions (daily and perhaps even sub-daily);

Let us take up the Met Office's challenge and see if we could figure out how to create that "common databank of unrestricted data" as of Day One, Hour One. Here is a description of the Hadley HadCM3 coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model.

Step 1 The Atmosphere Model

Atmosphere model (HadAM3)

HadAM3 is a grid point model and has a horizontal resolution of 3.75×2.5 degrees in longitude × latitude. This gives 96×73 grid points on the scalar (pressure, temperature and moisture) grid; the vector (wind velocity) grid is offset by 1/2 a grid box.[4] This gives a resolution of approximately 300 km, roughly equal to T42 in a spectral model. There are 19 levels in the vertical.

Okay, we are going to start by building a three-dimensional matrix (longitude x latitude x altitude) of three variables (pressure, temperature and moisture) that is 96 x 73 x 19. The results are typically displayed as the surface level only, so the surface level is only 96 x 73, which means we need 7,008 surface temperatures. That would be fine except that the maximum number of surfaces temperature in the databases was about 6,000 and has been culled to only about 1,200. You can read about in this paper by Joe D'Aleo & Anthony Watts. Now it turns out that the Hadley database is for land-based surface temperatures only, so we might reduce our demands from 7,008 surface temperatures to about 2,100 because the land surface of the earth is about 30% of the total surface. The existing 1,200 surface stations is only a bit more than half of the land surface total required.

Eminent climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer has prepared a map of the distribution of reporting stations, showing visually the paucity of reporting stations in the Southern Hemisphere. Note that for practical purposes the continents of South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica are missing. And we haven't even touched on the 70% of the earth's surface covered by oceans.

So right off the bat, we find abject failure in adequacy of accurate data collection. If the 1200 stations were evenly re-distributed, the area of the average box would have to nearly double. The total number of grid boxes is an indication of the grid's granularity. The less boxes the more granular the model becomes.

To match the number of grid boxes to the number of stations, we would need to reduce it to an 80 by 50 matrix. This would form 4000 boxes, 1200 on land and 2800 on the sea. The grid box size would increase from 3.75 degrees longitude by 2.5 degrees of latitude to 4.5 degrees longitude by 3.6 degrees latitude.

To give the reader an idea of how big the box has become, consider that Robert T. Merrill puts the median radius of an Atlantic hurricane at 2.4 degrees of latitude. The new grid box is now so big that it could nearly swallow the median size Atlantic hurricane whole, all the way to the outermost radius of closed isobar. This would reduce an Atlantic hurricane to just one average temperature, pressure and humidity value in the model. That would be absurd on its face.

An existing grid box in the Hadley climate model is 3.75 degrees in longitude by 2.5 degrees in latitude. Let's forget the quibbling argument over whether the Urban Heat Island Effect is biasing the results and look at the global question of whether any one set of single values of temperature, pressure and moisture adequately describes a grid box.

I've selected the grid box that includes Miami, Florida. Here are the reference longitudes and latitudes for its corners and for its geographic center

NW Corner   Long -83.75    Lat 27.50

SW Corner   Long -83.75    Lat 25.00

NE Corner    Long -80.00    Lat 27.50

SE Corner    Long -80.00    Lat 25.00

Center         Long -81.875   Lat 26.25

This website allows us to find data within a given radius of the geographic center. Using Lat 26.25N and Long 81.875 W and a Distance of 100 NM gives us list of stations safely within this one climate grid box  It is a circle of 200 NM (230 statute mile) diameter.

This website gives as a satellite view of the area sized to approximate the margins of the grid box. The site allows the user to move the cursor and get his lat/long, so one can outline the grid box for oneself.

1) The first challenge is to figure out whether this grid box belongs in the land based data set or in the ocean data set. Strictly on an area basis, it seems there is a bit more ocean then there is land. Following that logic, the residents of Miami are the 21st Century's residents of Atlantis.

2) The water surface topography includes, but is not limited to, the Gulf Stream, the Everglades and the Gulf of Mexico. Each brings different characteristics to the Incoming Solar Radiation/Outgoing Thermal Radiation balance. Sunlight can penetrate to much greater depths in the relatively still, clear, deep Gulf of Mexico. Its penetration in the Everglades is limited by the opacity of the water and its shallow depth. And the Gulf Stream is a conveyor of stored heat collected elsewhere in the tropics and released in Florida. The water surface temperature will be different for all three, especially over a 24 hour span where the heat capacity of the water creates the land breeze/sea breeze cycle.

Trying to distill all that texture into one grain of data in the global climate model is a fool's errand.

It is because of all those gaps in existing data collection that climatologists chose to start doing data "homogenization." They needed numbers to put in the empty grid boxes, so they averaged values from surrounding grid boxes that could be hundreds of miles away and filled them into the empty boxes.

But the climatologists have attempted to make up for their lack of fine enough granulation by vigorous temporal calculation. The description of the model continues:

The timestep is 30 minutes (with three sub-timesteps per timestep in the dynamics)

In plain English that means when they start running the program, they do dynamic sub-steps on a 10 minute interval. That's 144 dynamic calculations per day (6 per hour x 24 hours per day) based on a dataset the Met Office someday hopes to have available on a monthly (or maybe even daily) temporal resolution. 

It is as though in their minds they have increased the accuracy of the model by the number of calculations performed. They didn't want to increase the number of grid boxes, so they re-calculated the same data more frequently. If an accurate database and model were to be created, they could start to validate it once a day. Put in the data for Day One, run the model 144 times and compare the result to the data collected on Day Two. Currently, the accurate dataset does not exist.

It is easy to see why the climatologists trained on electronic calculators put so much faith in their computer models, they do millions of calculations, far beyond what one person could do with a slide rule and calculator. But garbage in still yields garbage out. This fascination with an astronomical number of calculations reminds me of George Santayana's definition of a fanatic:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

 - George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction
US (Spanish-born) philosopher (1863 - 1952)

I'll leave it to the readers to decide if they believe AGW alarmists to be fanatics.

[Bhoy]

That was fun. Thanks.

[grey_whiskers]

Like, *PING*, dude.

This is a good one. :-)

Neverdem, thanks for finding and sharing this.

g_w

[CanaGuy]

Hopefully, the recent rapid increase and release of dissenting articles will begin to fill in the huge gaps in the public knowledge. We need more articles like this one....however, even articles like this one still need the open scrutiny of legitimate peer review, heretofore stifled by the IPCC, NASA, AGW alarmists, economic opportunists and political mavens. We desperately need a moratorium on the drastic political and economic directions that have been prematurely foisted on an illiterate public.

[alaskanfan]

We had stories just like this all through the global warming scare. They were largely ignored by the MSM just as they are now.

It was easy to discredit from the beginning all you had to do was follow the money.

[abigailsmybaby]

I wish I understood Greek.

I read the whole thing. My head hurts now.

I think he’s saying climate change alarmists are fanatitards.

[bIlluminati]

Put it another way:

The best climate model is the weather model. They have and use the latest satellite data from all over the world, and can predict, with better than chance, 10-17 days ahead. A year ahead? The well-known butterfly effect (a butterfly flapping its wings today will affect world weather in less than a month, in a thoroughly unpredictable way) prevents any further useful predictions.

Anyone saying otherwise in a climate model, is using garbage in, garbage out.

1. It’s clear that the most important part of weather is convection. The whole reason a greenhouse is warm during the daytime is not some magical feature of glass (like holding infrared in while letting visible light in), but simply that the air in a greenhouse stays in a greenhouse. Open the doors in a greenhouse to allow ventilation, and the effect is minimized.

2. From 1, the Moon gets hot during the day because there is no air to convect the heat away.

3. The concept of a global mean temperature is meaningless. There is only a large number of local temperatures
.

4. We have no idea of the magnitude of most of the feedback mechanisms. For instance, in retrospect, this winter’s snow is believed to be caused by warm weather in previous summers melting north polar ice, allowing more water to evaporate, etc. This is a negative feedback mechanism, and we can conceive of several other large negative feedback systems involving vegetation, rotting vegetation, animal gases, etc. However, there are some positive feedback mechanisms, such as chopping down trees in the Amazon, to be shipped to England, to be burnt as fuel, so the utilities can meet their quota of biofuels (yes, this actually happens).

I could quote silliness on and on, but will stop here for now.

[Rocky]

Excellent.

The whole concept of calculating the earth’s temperature within a fraction of a degree is ludicrous. This article explains one of the main reasons. But to say so, you get ridiculed by scientists. I’ll say it anyway, “The emperor has no clothes.” Whatever trick is being used, whether with land-based temperatures, or with satellites, there must be far too many manipulations behind the scenes to consider the result reliable.

[count-your-change]

“Put in the data for Day One, run the model 144 times and compare the result to the data collected on Day Two”

Anyone can see the problem here, they just need to do the calculations 288 times or 50,000 times or something.. they just need more computer time! More staff, more grants, more more more...

[dirtboy]

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Which doesn't apply here, as the goal of the modellers is to prove something true that actually is false, all in the pursuit of an unrelated goal of 'sustainable' development - which is a far worse form of fanaticism - someone who has forgotten their aim can be reasoned with, but someone whose goal is dishonest cannot be.

[bjc]

Many thanks for the link.

I am no modeler, but one of the truly great desciptions of climate models and their limitations was written by Patrick Frank. http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v14n01_climate_of_belief.html

It is a gem: Clear, precise, powerfully revealing and beautifully written. Dr. Frank spent a lot of time thinking about GCMs, likely counter-arguments and how to communicate the issues to us laymen and laywomen. Skeptic is not peer reviewed but this article was reviewed by some of the significant names in climatology. For those of you technically incline there is an SI as well.

[steelyourfaith]

Thanx !

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[TalBlack]

Later

[bossmechanic]

Much appreciated.

[USS Alaska]

Whoa neverdem, if that was layman's language, I'm real glad that you didn't go all scientific on us.

I read your post and in real layman's language, "If a group of people want to 'prove' a given result, start with lies and embellish upon them."

Climate changes and man can observe, comment and predict, but has no power to alter.

The end.

[Rebelbase]

The Granularity of Climate Models

"Granularity, granularity!"

[The_Reader_David]

A nice critique, but the author doesn't go far enough. Climate modeling is a fool's errand from start to finish. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the mantra "weather isn't climate" hides the fact that climate is weather, averaged over longish time-intervals. Replacing the dynamical variables in a non-linear dynamical system with their time averages over fixed-length time intervals yields a different non-linear dynamical system. Climate is functionally impossible to predict for the same reason that weather is functionally impossible to predict: it is governed by non-linear dynamics.

I suspect most of the climate modelers started out as naive but honest scientists--naive because they didn't understand the point I just made, and assumed the variability of weather was akin to statistical noise, rather than being a fundamental part of the underlying dynamics of the system they were trying to model--and turned into crooks through the blandishments of the herd-mentality grant-funding system and the attention their dire predictions drew from the media and the political class. A doctorate in a science is hardly a shield against the vices of avarice and vainglory. Defending a pet theory by making up excuses in the face of its falsification is a form of vainglory peculiar to scientists, and the "warmists" seem to exhibit it to a degree not seen since a transparent gaseous "planet" was proposed to explain the precession of the orbit of Mercury in an attempt to save Newtonian mechanics.