earth meachine for indentify the climate
earth meachine for indentify the climate
The government building in the south of England looks open and airy with its three-storey glass facade. But security measures such as guards stationed at the front serve as a reminder that this Ministry of Defence property is carrying out sensitive work important to the nation's future. Deep in the building's basement, two adjoining rooms house 27 big black boxes that churn through a million lines of computer code every hour to gaze into the future of Earth and its 7 billion inhabitants.
This massive supercomputer at the UK Met Office in Exeter is home to what is possibly the world's most sophisticated climate model. Developed by researchers at the Hadley Centre, the Met Office's climate-change branch, the newly finished model will be put to its first big test over the coming months. It will run a series of climate simulations out to the year 2100 for the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on the physical-science basis of climate change, which is due out in 2013.
The Hadley Centre is at the forefront of efforts around the world to develop such complex climate models. "It's really pushing the envelope", says Andrew Weaver, a climate modeller at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Researchers hope that the added complexity will lead to more realistic predictions and help them to derive new insights about how elements of the climate interact with each other. But it is a bit of a gamble whether this monumental effort will actually help political leaders and researchers to plan for the future. Because models are simulating more components and each one is subject to variation, the extra complexity could make error bars expand greatly in forecasts of how temperatures or precipitation will change with time. "It's very likely that the generation of models that will be assessed for the next IPCC report will have a wider spread of possible climate outcomes as we move into the future," says Jim Hurrell, who is heading development of the Earth-system model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
From slime to leaf
As with all modern global climate models, HadGEM2-ES couples the atmospheric model with an ocean model. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the oceans in the earliest of the Hadley coupled models were called swamps and were little more than large, shallow puddles connecting continents. They gradually evolved into 'slab oceans', which were rigid but could absorb and release heat .The global ocean in HadGEM2-ES, by contrast, flows with currents and eddies. Its 40 layers reach down to 5,000 metres, with the top layer measuring just 10 metres thick, an important advance that allows models to simulate more realistically how the ocean takes up and retains carbon dioxide at different depths.
Amid the stark white walls and uniform desks of the Hadley Centre, researchers are wrestling with how to mimic the clouds and currents, trees and tundra and the myriad other aspects of the planet that can amplify or diminish global warming. Yet the only signs of the work that is done here are the lines of computer code scrolling across the computer monitors.
Identifying culprits
Model developers are only too familiar with the effects of errors. "That's not only common, that's the evolution that all of us go through," says Hurrell. To identify these quirks, each model goes through a rigorous testing phase. This involves putting the model through a series of 'control runs' in which its skill is tested by simulating a stable climate. The model is also commonly 'hindcast' to determine its ability to match historical changes. That's what HadGEM2-ES is currently doing and will finish up next month.
Practical constraints
Although the new models are better from an academic perspective, they do not necessarily produce results that are more useful for policy-makers wrestling with how to plan for the future. Jones acknowledges that models are "only useful if we understand them to the point where we have confidence in them". But, he says, "we're going into a future that we can't constrain with observations, and climate models are the only tool we have for making projections".
During the report-writing process, the IPCC authors will analyse all the model projections to develop their best estimates for the climate of the future. The estimates will include how quickly temperatures will rise, where rainfall will increase or decrease and how vegetation patterns will shift.
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