Global Warming Studies Demand More Compute Power

With the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, even skeptics are acknowledging that global warming is heating up.

According to the 4th Assessment Report, we can expect rising oceans, warmer oceans, sea ice reduction, warmer winters, and the like, all thanks to human-derived greenhouse gases that are playing havoc with our climate. The 2007 report will be presented in four phases during the year, with the first phase focusing on physical evidence of global change

"We are now seeing, not merely predicting, effects of greenhouse warming on a scale and in ways that were not observable before," said Gabriele Hegerl, associate research professor at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, who also co-authored a summary of the report for policymakers. Hegerl, a coordinating lead author of the IPCC report's chapter on "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change," goes on to say that "We've studied improved observations from land, sea and space, as well as better temperature reconstructions covering the last 1,000 years. Understanding the observations is really what this all is about. For instance, looking at the patterns of change in 20th-century temperatures, we can now distinguish between changes caused by greenhouse gases, man-made aerosols, variability in solar radiation and major volcanic eruptions."

As you might expect all of this obervation and modeling requires computing power -- and lots of it. To that end, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has activated its newest weather and climate supercomputers, increasing the computational might used for climate and weather forecasts by 320 percent. The IBM machines process 14 trillion calculations per second at maximum performance and ingest more than 240 million global observations daily. These computers also will process data from Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC) satellites, a series of six satellites launched in 2006.

"Better physics, better models, better data, and faster and more powerful supercomputing are the foundation for making better weather and climate forecasts," said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator."

"One of the most fascinating things is that we see that changes have already happened or are happening now in more climate variables than just temperature," says Hegerl. "For instance, there have been observed changes in ocean temperatures, global rainfall and in circulation of the atmosphere. We now are beginning to understand that these changes occur at least partly in response to anthropogenic influences on climate. This allows us to better evaluate model simulations, which do simulate aspects of these changes, although not as successfully as they simulate changes in temperature."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:18 AM  Permalink