AAAS: “High-resolution climate model forecasts a wet, turbulent future.” Let me start with a story I heard yesterday. One of my writing groups meets remotely, weekly, including 2 participants who live in eastern Florida + in Barbados, about 1600 miles apart. Both were almost giddy in recounting stories of recent intense rain events + flooding; for example Barbados recently experienced 17″ of rain over 2 days, with 1 drowning death.
Now let’s discuss advanced climate modeling. “To simulate hundreds of years in a manageable amount of computer time, [conventional] models divide the atmosphere into the equivalent of coarse pixels, 100 kilometers across, before solving the equations of fluid dynamics for each one.” But this coarseness leads to inaccuracies in the predictions, especially when it comes to patchy phenomena such as heat waves and downpours, which are heavily influenced by what happens at a finer scale.
“A new high-resolution modeling project called MESACLIP, run at great computational expense over the past 5 years, is putting Earth’s future into sharper focus by simulating the churning of the atmosphere and ocean at a level of detail similar to the scale of weather forecasts.” Unfortunately, the project reveals heightened risks for regions like the Gulf Coast and coastal California, where extreme rainfall could occur far more often than traditionally projected. “MESACLIP divides the atmosphere into 25-km boxes and the upper layer of the ocean into a 10-km grid…running global simulations that began in 1900 and looked ahead to 2100 for multiple greenhouse gas emission scenarios.”
The results better match the historic records of ocean and air temperature, which many climate models have long struggled to do. “They also better capture cold tongues of upwelling water and swirling eddies in the ocean, which are thought to play an important role in modulating wind patterns…they mimic the extreme rainfall events observed today far more accurately.” After 900 days of computing time + 4500 yrs of simulation, 6 petabytes of open data will prove to be a gold mine for climate scientists everywhere. Note a petabyte is a unit of digital information storage equal to one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes, or ~ 1,000 terabytes (TB). So—keep your shoes dry. Brought to you by the fossil fuel industries.
