SEMINAR: AOML Seminar WITH GOTOMEETING information - December 15, 2011 - 3:00 p.m.- Prof. Jagadish Shukla - “It is Necessary to Revolutionize Climate Prediction: Is it Possible?”

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AOML Seminar

 

DATE:                Thursday, December 15, 2011

TIME:                 3:00 p.m. – refreshments at

                           2:45 p.m.

Location:       AOML First Floor

                           Conference Room

SPEAKER:        Prof. Jagadish Shukla 

                          Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences (AOES)       

 George Mason University (GMU)

 Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies  (COLA)

 Institute for Global Environment and Society (IGES)

TITLE:              “It is Necessary to Revolutionize Climate Prediction: Is it Possible?” 

Abstract: Major scientific and technical discoveries are often followed by the creation of institutions that can take advantage of those 
discoveries for the betterment of society.  Advances in our understanding of atmospheric dynamics, accompanied by the technological 
breakthrough of fast automatic computing devices led to the rapid development of numerical weather prediction, a capability that has been 
institutionalized by many governments around the world, for example NCEP (USA) and ECMWF (UK).  A second example is the development of 
our scientific understanding of the potential for predictability at seasonal time scales in the midst of chaos. The application of that 
capability for seasonal climate prediction led to the creation of organizations like IRI (USA). Now we have before us, thanks to IPCC, a new major discovery:
 humans are affecting the Earth’s climate.  This talk will review our current understanding of the limits of predictability for weather, seasonal and decadal variations and climate change.  
The talk will also describe the scientific and institutional challenges in producing accurate, reliable and quantitative predictions of regional variations in a changing climate for science based adaptation strategies.

 

It is argued that because of the complexity of the climate system, and because the regional manifestations of climate change are mainly through changes in the statistics of regional weather variations, the scientific
and computational requirements to predict its behavior reliably are so enormous that the nations of the world should make the dual commitments of enhancing their national climate modeling efforts, and
creating a small number of multi-national research and high performance computing facilities dedicated to the grand challenges of predicting climate change on both global and regional scales over the coming decades.

 

Motivated by the success of internationally-funded infrastructure in other areas of science, the paper recommends that a small number of highly connected multi-national facilities should have computer
capability at each facility of about 20 petaflop in the near future and about 200 petaflop by the end of the next decade.  Such facilities will enable future IPCC assessments to be made using about 10 km
 resolution climate models, and dynamical seasonal predictions using 3-5 km cloud system resolving atmosphere models and eddy revolving ocean models.  This will also enable weather-climate modeling
and prediction research using about 1 km resolution atmosphere models and about 5 km ocean models.  Each facility should have enabling infrastructure including hardware, software and data analysis support,
 and scientific capacity to interact with the national centers and other visitors to the facility. Such facilities will play a key role in the development of next generation climate models, build global capacity,
nurture a highly trained workforce, and engage the global user community, policymakers and stakeholders.

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