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Topics : Forecasting

Climate's Future

The task of projecting Earth's climate for decades or more became realistic only with the advent of global climate models. These large and intricate software packages incorporate data on Earth's present or past state and chart the potential evolution of climate.



	NCAR's Bluesky supercomputer is one of the world's fastest, serving atmospheric scientists at UCAR member universities as well as NCAR and UOP.

Because the time scales they depict can be so vast, global climate models must include such features as solar variability in order to be as accurate as possible. Tiny changes in the tilt of Earth and the asymmetry of its path around the Sun can make a big difference to regional climate—sometimes enough to trigger an ice age.

NCAR's premier tool for understanding climate is the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). Developed during the 1990s, the CCSM simulates the many interconnected events that drive Earth’s climate. These include changes in the atmosphere and oceans, the ebb and flow of sea ice, and the subtle impacts of forests and rivers. To recreate a single day of the world’s climate, the model must perform 700 billion calculations on one of NCAR's supercomputers.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the CCSM belongs to the entire community of climate scientists, rather than to a single institution. The hundreds of specialists at various institutions in the United States and overseas who collaborate on improvements to the CCSM make the model's underlying computer code freely available on the Web.

Many NCAR scientists are part of a global team studying climate change and its meaning for our planet's future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change includes more than 1,000 experts from a variety of climate specialties. In their 2001 report, the IPCC predicts that increasing levels of greenhouse gases will warm the globe by a significant amount. The most probable range, according to the IPCC, is between 2.5 and 10.5°F (1.4–5.8°C). Also in 2001, an NCAR scientist and his colleague estimated a 90% likelihood that the range will fall between 3 and 9°F (1.7–4.9°C).

Researchers are now at work on the next IPCC report, due in 2007. It will draw extensively from the latest version of the CCSM, along with the latest climate models from other research centers around the world.

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