Climate Modeling Approaches ‘Golden Age’

By Tiffany Trader

November 12, 2014

High-performance computing is facing some of its toughest challenges yet, but supercomputing is also yielding better results than ever before. When it comes to climate science, for example, researchers are reporting higher resolutions and truer simulations. According to one Berkeley Lab researcher, climate science is on the verge of a golden age.

As described in a recent feature piece, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) climate scientist Michael Wehner has seen the time it takes to run a high-resolution simulation on a global climate model go from a matter of years down to just three months. The simulations matched actual observations more closely, and the high-resolution models were better at predicting extreme storms, such as hurricanes and cyclones.

“I’ve been calling this a golden age for high-resolution climate modeling because these supercomputers are enabling us to do gee-whiz science in a way we haven’t been able to do before,” said Wehner, who was also a lead author for the recent Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “These kinds of calculations have gone from basically intractable to heroic to now doable.”

Using National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) supercomputers and version 5.1 of the Community Atmospheric Model, Wehner and his colleagues carried out an analysis for the period 1979 to 2005 at three spatial resolutions: 25 km, 100 km, and 200 km. They compared these results to each other and to real-world observations.

Their results are published online in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

The team expects the high-resolution models will lead to a better understanding of how climate change will affect severe storms. In low-resolution models, hurricanes were under-represented. The higher resolution model is especially significant for mountainous areas where there is a greater need to simulate snow and rain.

In the future, climate models will be undertaken at 1 km resolution. There will also be improvements to better incorporate the impact of cloud systems. This is the next big thing in climate modeling, according to Wehner. At this point, scientists have a good understanding of how a warming world will impact weather, but a more fine-grained model will lead to even better predictive abilities, especially when it comes to intense storms.

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