Can Big Data Help Climate Change?

This visualization shows early test renderings of a global computational model of Earth's atmosphere using data from NASA

The Earth is big and its climate is complicated, with many different variants to take into account in order to be able to tell even whether it is about to rain next week, or, more alarming still, what will be the affects of the much talked about global warming – the reason to be holding the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To understand it, scientists turn to big, complicated climate simulations that run on supercomputers like the one at NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation in Maryland, US.

There, thousands of linked computers analyze an astounding amount of numbers to come up with predictions about how varying amounts of greenhouse gas emissions will affect our climate’s future.

“If you took everybody on the face of the Earth — all 7.3, 7.4 billion people — and you had them multiply two numbers together every single second for 145 hours, total, that’s what this entire computing center can do in one second,” Dan Duffy, the high-performance-computing lead at this center, told NPR.

A climate model, says Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, is best thought of as an encapsulation of everything that scientists can go out and measure. We can go and measure how much sunlight reflects off the sea ice,” Schmidt says. “We can go and measure how much water you need to have in the air before you form a cloud. You can go and measure how the winds affect the ocean currents, right? Those are physical processes that we’ve been observing for hundreds of years. A climate model encapsulates each of those processes, the ones that we think of as being important, and it links them all together.”

Researchers created the first primitive models of Earth’s climate back in the 1960s, on computers that used punch cards. Schmidt says there are now around 30 different groups worldwide doing climate simulations on supercomputers. And the consensus of these teams is that if greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, the world will look different.

“You’re looking at a situation where there’s very little ice left in the Arctic; you are looking at temperature changes on land that are the equivalent of moving south by about a couple thousand miles,” says Schmidt.

Researchers don’t claim that these models will get everything exactly right, but Schmidt says that, “Nonetheless, they make useful predictions”.

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