Ode To Climate Models That Accept Specific Data And Delivers Authentic Output

In the previous article of this series harping upon climate models, we focused on the inner contents of climate model but here we would uncover the data that scientists manage as input into such models in a bid to ferret out the result after determined data manipulation is done as processing.

Truly, to push forth climate models into supreme advancement, we need data pertaining to factors present in the climate and useful projections are made as to what changes would occur therein. The data stream output released by such climate models as output is pretty voluminous counting in petabytes data, which has multiple types including many variables reflected thereby, as in space and time, temperature, clouds, air pressure, quantification of salinity soaked in ocean and so forth.

Set Of Inputs:

The major stream acting as inputs, in such models are certain factors prominent externally which can affect the strength of sun’s energy that is viable to be absorbed by earth or what gets tossed back into the atmosphere.

There are prominent forces present externally in atmosphere that are called “forcings” and which include output by sun, greenhouse gases prevailing for a long time like CO2, methane, nitrous oxides and halocarbons and then, there is an enormous amount of tiny particles too, known as aerosols which are released when fossil fuels are burnt while forest fires and volcanic eruptions are among its top contributors too. With aerosols, intruding sunlight is reflected and it influences the process of cloud formation too.

Such forcings are managed individually through a model which can either be like any superior guess made in the past or anything related to possible emission outcome predicted for future. To analyse the greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere, such models are like powerful mirroring machines on grounds that technology, energy and use of land would be like, a few centuries from now.

Till date, majority of the model types are based upon one or more of the “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCP), revealing logical and actionable details about the future, taking into account the socio-economic set up across the world.

Forcings of the past years, also act like factors of considerations in models just to study the change occurred in climate in the past a few hundred years. Further, evidences related to changes occurred in Earth’s orbit, forcings of the past are judged upon while a few other factors are also taken into account such as greenhouse gas concentration occurred in history, volcanic eruptions occurred in earlier decades, changes taken place in the number of sunspot points as well as such climatic datasets of faraway times.

Beyond this, we also have another noticeable aspect of climate systems called as “control runs” holding radiative forcing totally static that is of hundreds of years of timeframe. As a result, scientists are empowered to make an easy comparison of modelled climate either by taking into consideration the changes occurred in human forcings as well as other natural aspects or not but they easily carry out an assessment and also occurrence of any natural variability which is “unforced” can easily be gauged.

Stream Of Outputs

One can get a picture about the climate of our planet, in its completeness and clarity, with the help of such versatile climate models while the output also involves distinct set of variables to the tune of thousands, which are according to set timeframes such as per day, per hour or according to month.

Such outputs indicate temperatures and humidity as prevail in varied layers of the atmosphere that is from earth’s surface towards the upper stratosphere and also include the temperature variation, acidity and saline levels of oceans which is from earth’s surface to down into the oceans.

Besides, we also obtain info about snowfall, rainfall, snow cover and stretch of glaciers, ice layers and ice present in the sea. Such climate models indicate the wind speed, strength and direction and also a handful of other climate aspects like jet stream and currents running inside the oceans.

Unusually, models output also cover layers of clouds and their height and some variables with distinct technicalities such as upwelling longwave radiation related to surface and then, we can also get to know about amount of energy reflection from earth’s surface towards atmosphere. In the same way, one can also know about the sea salt which is released by oceans during the process of evaporation and that gets gathered on the land surface.

In case of “climate sensitivity” we can also get to know about it, which is about the depth in sensitivity in earth about greenhouse concentrations and scores of climate aspects are evaluated during the process, such as water vapour and any changes taking place in earth’s reflectivity that is related to ice loss.

Clearly, petabytes of data gets stored in modellers that are stationed at National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and data is made available for analysis which is in form of netCDF files, an easy format for researchers to evaluate quickly and to initiate further steps.

Faisal Mahmood