Phys.org May 4, 2024 Marine and terrestrial biogeochemical models are key components of the Earth System Models (ESMs) used to project future environmental changes, but their slow adjustment time also hinders effective use of ESMs because of the enormous computational resources required to integrate them to a pre-industrial equilibrium. Researchers in the UK developed a process based on “sequence acceleration” to accelerate equilibration of state-of-the-art marine biogeochemical models by over an order of magnitude. The technique could be applied in a “black box” fashion to existing models. Even under the challenging spin-up protocols used for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change […]
Tag Archives: Climate modeling
Study of Earth’s stratosphere reduces uncertainty in future climate change
Phys.org June 26, 2023 Future increases in stratospheric water vapour risk amplifying climate change and slowing down the recovery of the ozone layer. Uncertainty in modeling primarily arises from the complex processes leading to dehydration of air during its tropical ascent into the stratosphere. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – NOAA, University of Colorado, Switzerland, Germany) used a statistical-learning approach to infer historical co-variations between the atmospheric temperature structure and tropical lower stratospheric water vapour concentrations. They demonstrated that these historically constrained relationships are predictive of the water vapour response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and obtained an […]
Scientists improve the accuracy of weather and climate models
Phys.org March 1, 2023 Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new modelling framework for atmospheric flow simulations for cryospheric regions called CRYOWRF. CRYOWRF couples the state-of-the-art and used atmospheric model WRF (the Weather Research and Forecasting model) with the detailed snow cover model SNOWPACK. CRYOWRF makes it feasible to simulate the dynamics of a large number of snow layers governed by grain-scale prognostic variables with online coupling to the atmosphere for multiscale simulations from the synoptic to the turbulent scales. They also introduced a scheme for blowing snow in CRYOWRF. They described the technical design goals, model capabilities and the […]
The lightness of water vapor adds heft to global climate models
Science Daily October 24, 2022 The molar mass of water vapour is less than that of dry air, making humid air lighter than dry air at the same temperature and pressure. This effect is known as vapour buoyancy and has been considered negligibly small in large-scale climate dynamics. Using theory, reanalysis data and a hierarchy of climate models a team of researchers in the US (UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) showed that vapour buoyancy has a similar magnitude to thermal buoyancy in the tropical free troposphere. They also showed that vapour buoyancy makes cold air […]
Cloud study demystifies impact of aerosols
Science Daily August 1, 2022 Aerosol–cloud interactions have a potentially large impact on climate. The impacts derived from climate models are poorly constrained by observations because retrieving robust large-scale signals of aerosol–cloud interactions is frequently hampered by the considerable noise associated with meteorological co-variability. An international team of researchers (UK, Switzerland, Germany, USA – NASA) disentangled significant signals from the noise of meteorological co-variability using a satellite-based machine-learning approach. Their analysis showed that aerosols from the 2014 Holuhraun effusive eruption in Iceland increased cloud cover by approximately 10%, and this appears to be the leading cause of climate forcing, rather […]
A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts
Science Daily May 31, 2022 Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability. But they occur on a length- and timescale that today’s models can’t come close to reproducing. Therefore, they included in models through a variety of approximations. A team of researchers in the US (UC Irvine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Washington, industry) is working to fix this glaring gap by breaking the climate modeling problem into two parts: a coarse-grained, lower-resolution (100km) planetary model and many small patches with 100 to 200 meter resolution. They developed a […]