Posted on 10/01/2003 7:20:18 AM PDT by bedolido
Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer.
The results, being presented at a workshop in Cambridge, UK, on Wednesday, are "really quite staggering" says Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling at the University of Reading, UK.
Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that detailed features of the weather - such as tropical storms - can be included.
In one sequence from the model, says Slingo, "you can see a typhoon going up to Japan and it even has a little eye".
Weather forecasters already use high-resolution models to predict how hurricanes will evolve, but they can only look a few days into the future. The vast computing power of the Earth Simulator means it can simulate years of climate, which is vital to predicting how global warming will affect our weather.
For example, with hurricanes in the models, scientists can work out whether these ferocious storms will become more frequent as the planet gets hotter. Historical data suggests that there is no upward trend in the number of hurricanes, but only the climate models can predict the future.
Past and future
With more computer power, scientists can also include more elements of the Earth's climate system, such as the oceans, the atmosphere, their chemistry and the carbon cycle. This should make forecasts of future temperature rises more reliable. Keiko Takahashi, who works at the Earth Simulator Centre, says they have already carried out several experiments that look 50 years ahead.
Other scientists at the workshop are eagerly waiting for their chance to use the Earth Simulator, which was officially opened in March 2002. Paul Valdes, a paleoclimatologist from the University of Bristol, UK, is one of those in the queue and he wants to study the past, rather than the future climate.
"We will model the whole of the last 21,000 years," says Valdes. Then he will compare the data generated to real world data from ice cores, tree rings and stalactites to see if they match up. "The next few years promises to be a very exciting time for paleoclimate modelling" he says.
The Earth Simulator results presented at the meeting are only the beginning, agrees Slingo. "It is like the Hubble Telescope - it's a piece of kit, and we are just learning how to use it."
Jenny Hogan
I am impressed by the technology though.
ROFLMBO -- Electric prophets!
This really is a curious statement. Of course it's false on it's face. The Oracle of Delphi can predict the future -- my 5-year-old can predict the future.So, the statement isn't saying what it's saying -- it's saying something different.
I think what they mean is that only climate models can provide ACCURATE predictions. But this is arrogance since they do not yet have these predictions from the new supercomputer, and therefore they have not done any verification work to see if the predictions have any validity.
Scientists are often arrogant. As another poster said, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Yeah. Ten kilometers away from here the weather is nearly always quite different. It is interesting to see the notation that they haven't been including the OCEANS, nor the CARBON CYCLE in their models. I wonder if they've figured a way to include the Sun and the albedo yet.
So far they've been ignoring most of the important factors and trying to predict based on a few not-actually-known secondary factors. It's roughly like determining gas-milage on a car by the shape and size of the gas-pedal - yeah, all else being equal it probably would make a difference, but it's well down the chain.
Sure, from basic science they can get an idea, but they don't need a supercomputer to do it. Here is some basic science they should consider and include in whatever propaganda they are spewing.
The energy available for storms is a fraction of the atmospheric energy. Here is the atmospheric energy, and the ratio of the energies before and after a 2o global temperature rise:
That's quite an increase in the storms energy, isn't it? Sure the storms are big, but they could only get 0.7% bigger. That's no reason to panic and turn over global energy resource use to a committee of leftists.
Please never do this again... I never understood it in college and the very sight of it brings back sad memories of great failures (/*sarcasm)
How big are a butterfly's wings....
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