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Research Over Tibet Gives Climate Insight
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered thunderstorms above Tibet offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere. From the article: ' Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosphere is essential for understanding future threats to the ozone layer, which shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.'"
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If you'd like to run your own NASA Global Climate Model (GCM) on your own computer, the EdGCM project has ported a GCM to Mac & Windows and wrapped it in a GUI so you can point-and-click your way around. Turn the sun down or add some nitrogen, whatever you want...
Note that the resolution is pretty coarse (8x10 degrees) so that it still runs at a decent clip on your Mac/PC, and therefore Tibet gets 1 or 2 grid cells, that is about it.
We just had a request about removing the Tibetian plateau and the resulting effect on Earth climate.
Disclaimer: I'm a developer on the project.
Space and Computers.
Wow. I don't even really know what to say to this.
In the troposphere, while it's typically pretty stable, there are cases where it is unstable and particularly strong convection occurs. One case of particularly strong upward motion is supercell thunderstorms. But the upward motion tends to slow and stop at or slightly above the tropopause. Temperature decreases with height in the troposphere, but increases with height in the stratosphere. While momentum carries strong updrafts into the very lower troposphere, even the air in the strongest updrafts don't continue very far before descending again.
In other words, there's not a whole lot of mass exchange occurring between the troposphere and stratosphere.
Understanding this exchange and the sources and sinks of water vapor and other chemicals in the stratosphere is one way to better improve our study of things in the stratosphere.
And you greatly overestimate the accuracy of any numerical model on a computer. It is very impressive, given the large amount of parameterizations and approximations made, that computer models produce as good of output and forecast the weather as well as they do.
The good news: global warming will be solved within 50 years!
The bad news: it will coincide with the deindustrialization of our civilization due to the lack of fossil fuels.