A new technique to simulate climate change

Space Daily via SPX: Scientists are using ever more complex models running on ever more powerful computers to simulate the earth's climate. But new research suggests that basic physics could offer a simpler and more meaningful way to model key elements of climate.

The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that a technique called direct statistical simulation does a good job of modeling fluid jets, fast-moving flows that form naturally in oceans and in the atmosphere. Brad Marston, professor of physics at Brown University and one of the authors of the paper, says the findings are a key step toward bringing powerful statistical models rooted in basic physics to bear on climate science.

In addition to the Physical Review Letters paper, Marston will report on the work at a meeting of the American Physical Society to be held in Baltimore this later month.

The method of simulation used in climate science now is useful but cumbersome, Marston said. The method, known as direct numerical simulation, amounts to taking a modified weather model and running it through long periods of time. Moment-to-moment weather - rainfall, temperatures, wind speeds at a given moment, and other variables - is averaged over time to arrive at the climate statistics of interest. Because the simulations need to account for every weather event along the way, they are mind-bogglingly complex, take a long time run, and require the world's most powerful computers.

Direct statistical simulation, on the other hand, is a new way of looking at climate. "The approach we're investigating," Marston said, "is the idea that one can directly find the statistics without having to do these lengthy time integrations."...

A fresh breeze in the West wind belt, from Roald Amundsen's "The South Pole"