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NASA Releases Free Global Climate Model Software
ink_polaroid writes "NASA has released its Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM) for high school and university desktop computers. The software incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users."
It would be pretty cool to simulate enviromental doomsday scenarios such as the one seen in the movie The Day after Tomorrow.
That's great. One of my favorite software packages in the world is Nasa's World Wind, but when I tried to show it to my parents (both high school science teachers), the reaction was the same: we don't have time or computers to use this.
The state of public education (at least in California) is so poor that this is going to be great for college-level students, but much of the target audience will be left out due to budgets and a testing-centric curriculum.
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Is it fsp or rts? Is it multi-player and/or single player? And is there a God mode?
Approx. 40mb downloads page
l ler.sit OS X
ftp://ftp.giss.nasa.gov/pub/edgcm/EdGCM_Mac_Insta
More interesting would be simulating the terraforming of mars. Could we raise the temperature sufficiently by introducing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? How about if we used a massive orbital mirror? Or maybe we could grind one of the moons into dust and make an artificial ring to increase ambient light. Inquiring minds want to know.
In further news today: 1000's of computer's around the World today began running climate modeling software.
The Combined heat output from all this extra computer processing is expected to bring most model predictions forward by several years due to the extra heat expended.
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SETI - The project were you can look for life on another planet whilst help kill off the current one quicker. I mean would an `intelligent` form of life be chucking out loads of extra signals wasting resources; Search for dead planets maybe, but intelligent life, HA.
It would be pretty cool to simulate enviromental doomsday scenarios...
I thought they already said that in the story outline - yes, here it is:
It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users
Obviously here they are talking about the Blue Globe of Death.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We ARE ALL DoooooooMED!!!
They are science related topics, which fits the "News for Nerds" part of the masthead.
For example:
NASA (space) Releases (verb) Free (adjective) Global Climate Model (science) Software (computers)
How can that possibly not be appropriate for slashdot?
You might also want to check out the following (Distributed Computing) project:
ClimatePrediction.net
> Latest science says fossil fuels are good and protect against global warming.
No, it says the emission of fossil fuel by-products limit the effects of CO2-emissions. Stopping the emission of those by-products will release the full effect of the CO2 emission.
So, does that mean fossil fuels are good and protect us from global warming, like you concluded?
No, it means that some by-products are good and momentarily soften the effect of the consumption of fossil fuel.
It's like saying taking crack is good, because it prevents the signs of withdrawal.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
"We recommend that you NOT leave the GCM running on a Windows laptop unattended. We have found that some Pentium laptops have difficulty dissipating heat and may shutdown (hibernate) without warning causing the climate model to crash. This does not appear to harm the laptop, but can corrupt GCM output files."
You heard it here first, laptop heat can cause infertility and crash the planet!
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In fact, it's much easier to look at the system as a whole than try to go for extreme detail such as cloud-cover on a very small area, such as a city. We can forecast cloud-covers in a larger scale very accurately. As an analogy, neither do we need to know where every strain of sand is in order to draw a map.
"Climate is what we expect, wheather is what we get."
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
To back up the parent poster, consider the following:
We are unable to predict the electron density at a specific point in a a metal wire, at a given time.
Yet, we _are_ able to predict the total behaviour of electricty in a wire. Given that electricity is motion of electrons, how does this arise?
Well, this is a common situation, where models of behaviour at different scales are related only through a very small number of parameters.
For example, we can predict the magnetic behaviour of a system from just two parameters (for an binary antiferromagnet), yet to calculate the behaviour of the electrons (which cause said magnetism) takes of the order of 100 or so (and about 15 orders of magnitude longer).
So for practical calculations on magnatic things, you don't need to do the quantum mechanical calculations, just the much simpler ones.
Sure, technically these are inaccurate. In my experience, we're off by 0.001%, and by about 3-5% in the second derivative. That's so accurate, that there are very many additional cases where the calculations show two possible results, and the experiments arn't accurate enough to tell these apart. Or, in plain terms, good enough.
I use magnetism and electricity as examples here, because if these agrregate models didn't work, then the computer that you are using to read these works also wouldn't work. That's a pretty solid argument for the usefulness of these types of models.
Brining this back to weather and climate, the weather researchers call 'weather' individual and specific data points, like cloud cover, rainfall on a day, and so on. 'Climate' is things like total rainfall per year, average temperature in a month - much broader, less specific information.