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Scientists: Beef up climate modeling Researchers ask U.S. Senate panel to help fine-tune national system with more funding for supercomputing, research and observation Rose Ragsdale For Petroleum News
As average temperatures rise and sea and glacial ice continues to melt in the Arctic, several top scientists urged a Senate panel May 8 to allocate generous resources for climate modeling research in the United States.
Despite advances in climate modeling that now reliably show that global surface warming of recent decades is a response to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists said the field is woefully lacking in supercomputing capacity, observers and researchers needed to provide precise climate forecasts at the regional and local levels.
“The global community is now faced with a new set of urgent problems relating climate change to human health, water resources, food supplies, changing risks of forests to fires and insect disease, and threats to managed and natural ecosystems,” supercomputing researcher James J. Hack told a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
The Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee is chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is a member.
Regional, local predictions needed More accurate predictions of future climate changes will contribute to improved preparation for and response to drought, hurricanes, coastal inundation associated with storms and sea level rise, heat waves, poor air quality, and forest fires, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Alexander MacDonald.
Though climate models have demonstrably improved man’s ability to simulate the Earth’s climate, he said ordinary people need climate information translated into reliable resource predictions such as energy, salmon, water and weather predictions.
However, “gaps in understanding” remain and the demand for scientifically credible projections of future climate change goes beyond what currently can be offered, he said.
“In order to address these issues, the community needs to develop and undertake a coordinated research program balanced and integrated among observation, theory and computation,” said Hack, who directs the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory near Knoxville, Tenn.
Alaska’s needs critical In Alaska, the statewide annual average temperature has increased by 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-20th century, and the increase is much greater (6.3 degrees F) in winter, said John E. Walsh, director of the Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research and the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“The higher temperatures of the recent decades have been associated with an earlier snowmelt in spring, a reduction of summer sea ice coverage, a retreat of many glaciers, and a warming of permafrost,” Walsh told the committee.
“In many respects, Alaska is ‘ground zero’ for recent climate change,” he said.
For example, melting glacial ice, disappearing coastline, ground firmness, dryness of vegetation during fire season, wind chill temperatures in certain areas and tracking precipitation in remote areas such as the Yukon and Tanana River valleys are all critical issues, he said.
Lessons in weather modeling Walsh said the climate modeling community can learn from the weather modeling community, which has improved dramatically in recent decades with the help of congressional funding and a balanced approach.
“Climate modeling needs an observational system and coordination nationally,” he said. “It’s not going to happen piecemeal.”
The other scientists agreed.
Edward Sarachik, a retired researcher at the University of Washington and NOAA, said climate modeling can now make global climate predictions to some degree, but the variability created by natural phenomena such as El Niño, Pacific Decadal Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation has been neglected and incorporated poorly into the models.
“On scales smaller than continental scale, the models are not useful and downscaling to smaller space scales by higher resolution models using the large global models as boundary conditions cannot be expected to improve the situation,” Sarachik said.
Sarachik also said a lack of research funding for climate modeling is driving many young scientists into related fields.
Arctic thawing illustrates problem Stevens told the scientists that recent research showed thawing of Arctic ice is due to Atlantic Ocean currents sweeping warm water into the Arctic Ocean and melting the ice from the bottom up rather than carbon dioxide emissions causing the thawing from the top down as previously believed.
“The fact that climate models don’t agree indicates how (far) we are from being able to make accurate predictions,” Sarachik told the senators.
Kerry said signs of global warming have been observed in Alaska. “We’re spending $100 million to move a village because of it,” he added.
Congress actually has authorized spending $100 million each to move the Northwest Alaska villages of Kivalina and Shishmaref, according to Joe Brenckle, a Stevens spokesman.
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