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Earth Simulator Now Predicting Hurricanes?
GeoGreg writes "The BBC is reporting that the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer is producing results showing that it is possible to model climate down to the level of severe weather events such as hurricanes. This computer has been discussed on Slashdot previously, and it sounds like at least some of the hype around this beastie was justified."
Can It predict where to put the butterfly to stop them ?
the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer is producing results showing that it is possible to model climate down to the level of severe weather events
Sure, you can model it, but how accurate is the model? I can model a cow as a sphere, but I haven't told you if that is appropriate for what I need.
I'm still waiting for a supercomputer that can create hurricanes. Who cares about predicting them when you can't do anything to stop them? I envision a future where we stop hurricanes by throwing other hurricanes at them, and nations conduct large scale wars by throwing hurricanes at each other.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Wow, I'm surprised that a resolution of 10 cubic kilometers is enough to actually make any predictions besides the most general of weather trends.
Think of the variation between the state of air at sea level and then at the ceiling of a 10km cell... that's some severe approximation.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
The conclusion was basically that Japan would be f***'ed if such was to happen, but that's rant for another day.
So, earthsimulator simulates a lot of things. I am surprised that they don't model nuclear blasts on them, because it certainly CAN. Or at least we just don't know about it.
One thing is for sure, though - I will attest that NEC definitely made a bundle over this =)
btw, for ppl who are in japan, you can schedule tours to the place. I havn't tried yet, but in case anyone is interested... (now that I think about it, wasn't there a story about this a while back?) but here is a link just for fun: visitor information.
and if you are brave enough for the same page in japanese, click here. (The japanese page has a japanese map, which shows station names in kanji. I always found kanji station names to be more help, but that might be just me...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
As mentioned before, there is a distributed project called climateprediction.net
for those who want to participate themselves. It is run by the University of Oxford in the UK, it is not affiliated with . So far only a windows client, but a Linux one is in the works. It is very CPU intensive, so if you have less than an 800mhz processor you shouldn't bother, it would take months to finish a single unit of work.
Hey, do you find it suprising that the nation that knows the least about climate science is the one that is most skeptical about global warming?
"In little more than a decade, the United States has fallen significantly behind other countries in its ability to simulate and predict long-term shifts in climate, according to a wide range of scientists and recent federal studies."
"During the Clinton administration, the lack of American modeling leadership did not have a discernible impact on climate policy, various experts said. But it did prevent the United States from playing a more central role in writing critical sections of the Intergovernmental Panel's report -- particularly the part assessing the extent of human influence on the warming trend of recent decades.
In computing power, Dr. Sarachik said, "our top two centers together don't amount to one-fifth of the European effort."
In that article from the New York Times is from two years ago! It mentions the japanese plans to build the Earth Simulator.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Each run of the model only offers one solution (called a deterministic forecast).
There is a technique called ensemble forecasting, whereby you run multiple instances of the model with slightly disturbed initial conditions and/or slightly tweaked model parameters. You can then examine the statistics of the ensemble to try and obtain information a deterministic forecast might not be able to give you.
Note that the goal in this particular case is not hurricane forecasting as such. The newsworthy information is that this is the first time that a climate model can be run at a resolution high enough that hurricanes become possible within the simulation. Short term models used for the daily weather forecast do this reasonably well already.