[FRIAM] Climate Modeling

Sun Jan 19 19:18:50 EST 2020

When I was working at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (1990-1996), one
of our prominent users was Kelvin Droegemeier.  He was a professor at the
University of Oklahoma and director of the center for the analysis and
prediction of storms he was an expert on tornadoes.  I'm not sure about his
knowledge of climate dynamics over the millennia but he wrote very
mathematical papers about weather.  A Google search tells me that he is now
an advisor to President Trump so I don't know what his ideological biases
but he's a very advanced meteorologist.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 2:53 PM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Eric -
>
> Great back-of-envelop summary/speculation and I second your desire for
> someone well-steeped in these modeling/assessment issues.
>
> We (speaking out of school for Merle, Stephen, and the team that went to
> and met with the Stockholm Team last month) would love to find someone with
> that depth/breadth of knowledge in this group (or one degree away).  I am
> remiss/slow in following up with the *one* member of the Stockholm
> Resilience Center I met there who *might* either have this level of
> depth/breadth or know someone who does.
>
> I am trying hard to come up to speed, but the number of models and types
> of approaches and hidden agendas/constraints/assumptions are still
> overwhelming.   The IPCC seems to be the *best* official source that is
> most broadly accepted, etc.  but tends to be one or two levels of detail
> above the kinds of questions I have (and you are asking here).
>
> I am interested in something much broader than just the
> geo/bio/cryo/hydro/aero-science of it all, though THAT is huge and
> complicated enough as it is.   The Integrated Assessment Models that join
> this *physical* domain with the socio(political)economic domain seems most
> well discussed by the work of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project
> (CMIP) lead by LLNL and tied into the World Climate Research Programme
> (WCRP) who are providing some of the "heavy lifting" for the IPCC's next
> (VI) report due in 2021.
>
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupled_Model_Intercomparison_Project
>
>     https://www.wcrp-climate.org/
>
> - Steve
> On 1/19/20 2:00 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>
> Would be interesting to know what the buffers are, that weren’t in that
> run of models.
>
> Temperatures are lower than forecast, but Greenland and Antarctic ice
> sheet melting rates are higher.  They seem like small land areas, and the
> ice volume small, but specific heat of melting is large per volume compared
> to specific heat of air, and the atmosphere, while thick compared to ice,
> is only 10-20 km high (to the top of the troposphere; stratosphere up to
> maybe 50km at much-reduced density and much increased transparency because
> it is dry).  So troposphere maybe 20-40 times the depth of the west
> antarctic ice sheet, though only a lowermost layer of that is melting, and
> I don’t know the thickness per unit time lost.  Specific heat of dry air is
> about 1 J/gK, while heat of melting of clean water is 334 J/g.  Ice is
> about 1000 times as dense as air, so one has a volume ratio of about 3x10^5
> to play with, per degree Kelvin.
>
> Greenland plus Antarctica (wikipedia-level area estimates) are about 3% of
> earth surface area.  So if one divided by a column density ratio of 30:1
> and multiplied by an area ratio of 0.03, one has about 1/1000.  So a full
> melt of Greenland and Antarctic ice could buffer about 300K of atmospheric
> temperature change at a dimensional-analysis-level estimate.  If the full
> rate of melting were mis-estimated by a factor that extends the ice sheet
> lifetimes by 600 years, that would give about 1/2 degree per year buffering
> capacity.
>
> I don’t know what is or isn’t in the models up to 2014, because I haven’t
> followed these things closely, but unless what I wrote above is nonsense,
> it seems that a mis-estimate of just continental ice sheet melting is not
> wildly out of scale to account for unmodeled buffers.
>
> One also wants to take into account arctic se ice, which if I really is on
> a faster melting schedule then some models predicted, though I don’t have
> even a good impressionistic memory of what I have heard on that.
>
> And of course there is the heat-transport rate of cyclonic storms, from
> sea surface to the top of the troposphere, where radiative transfer through
> the stratosphere will be much faster than that from the interior of the
> troposphere or the surface.  My understanding is that predicting frequency
> and intensity of typhoons etc. is still something of a challenge area, but
> I don’t know if that affects parameters used in GCM and heat-transfer
> models enough to count as an un-modeled buffer.
>
> Would be great if there is somebody on this list who has a comprehensive
> enough knowledge of the state of this literature to give the kind of survey
> of the state of the art in response to questions, that is hard to get from
> broadcast.  Good as it is, broadcast just contains whatever it contains,
> and doesn’t have the responsiveness of a person who can hear a question in
> context and then recruit knowledge for a matched reply.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 20, 2020, at 1:55 AM, Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
> wrote:
>
>
> Fortunately it seems that the earth is warming much slower than what the
> models predicted. So just maybe we have hope?
>
>
>
>
> <image.png>
>
>
> *https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/*
> <https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/>
>
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2020 at 22:36, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
>> Trump's channel Fox News is owned by the Australian Murdoch family. Can
>> two families ruin the entire planet? Trump in America and Murdoch in
>> Australia are creating tremendous damage. If Climate Change leads to an
>> uninhabitable world, as David Wallace-Wells describes in his book, these
>> two families certainly contributed to it
>>
>> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GVPFH5V/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
>>
>> The Washington Post writes:
>> "When we think of industries that must change to prevent further global
>> warming, we tend to imagine carbon-intensive concerns such as mining,
>> aviation and energy production. But the Murdoch media and the rest of the
>> climate denialist industry will also need a transition plan. They do not
>> have long to implement it."
>>
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/16/australias-catastrophic-fires-are-moment-reckoning-murdochs-media-empire/
>>
>> -Jochen
>>
>>
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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