/what-the-hell-is-a-climate-modeland-why

What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter? - MIT Technology Review

►https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610225/what-the-hell-is-a-climate-modeland-why-does-it-matter

Merci @freakonometrics d’avoir signalé cet opus

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What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter?
Better technology, techniques, and data sharing have allowed scientists to try novel experiments—or simply run many more of them.

by James Temple February 8, 2018

Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom held that you couldn’t attribute any single extreme weather event to climate change. But now scientists increasingly can and do state the odds that human actions caused or exacerbated specific droughts and hurricanes.

#climat

What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter? - MIT Technology Review
►https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610225/what-the-hell-is-a-climate-modeland-why-does-it-matter

https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/obj-datastreamsocial.png?cx=0&cy=0&cw=2796&ch=1572&sw=1200

Climate models are sophisticated computer simulations that approximate how the planet responds to various forces, like surges in carbon dioxide. They break down the oceans, surface, and atmosphere into 3-D boxes and calculate how shifting conditions track across time and space.

Basic gains in computing power have driven many of the improvements. Those boxes were about 500 square kilometers in 1990. For some of today’s highest-resolution models, including the Department of Energy’s E3SM, Japan’s MRI, and China’s FGOALS, they are under 25 square kilometers. The resolution gets higher still for specific applications, such as modeling hurricanes.

In addition, the earliest climate models in the 1960s were focused on the atmosphere, but now they take into account land surfaces, sea ice, aerosols, the carbon cycle, vegetation, and atmospheric chemistry. More recently, models have started to incorporate the ways that human behavior shifts in response to climate change, including migration and deforestation.

#modélisation #climat