Tim Palmer

Abstract:

The author, T. N. Palmer describes a book by Isaac Asimov titled Nightfall, which describes a civilization's first encounter with darkness for thousands of years. The civilization inhabits the planet Lagash, which orbits one of six gravitationally-bound suns. Nightfall occurs during a total eclipse, when only one of the suns is above the horizon. Although in this sense climate change is inherently predictable, the author is not confirm whether how reliable the predictions of climate change are in practice. The first message of the story is that reliable predictions of regional climate change are crucially important to guide decisions on infrastructure investment for societies to adapt to future climate change. The second message of the story is that if current climate models can systematically misrepresent the regional effects of the annual cycle, they can also misrepresent the regional effects of climate change. One way to reduce these systematic deficiencies would be to simulate more of the climate system with the proper equations of motion.

Abstract:

National climate research facilities must be enhanced and dedicated multi-national facilities should be established to accelerate progress in understanding and predicting regional climate change. In addition to the merits of running climate models at a resolution comparable with that of NWP models, the continual confrontation of an NWP model with observations can provide important constraints when the same model is used for much longer-time-scale climate predictions. Short-range forecast models give encouraging results using grid lengths of close to 1 km, without parameterizing deep convection. Prediction uncertainty, a key variable can be estimated by making an ensemble of forecasts with varying initial conditions, model equations, and other input fields such as greenhouse gas concentrations. The new generation of models will yield improved statistics of daily weather and, therefore, better predictions of regional climate variations on seasonal time scales.

Abstract:

Some scientists have proposed the Earth-System Prediction Initiative (EPI) at the 2007 GEO Summit in Cape Town, South Africa. EPI will draw upon coordination between international programs for Earth system observations, prediction, and warning, such as the WCRP, WWRP, GCOS, and hence contribute to GEO and the GEOSS. It will link with international organizations, such as the International Council for Science (ICSU), Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), UNEP, WMO, and World Health Organization (WHO). The proposed initiative will provide high-resolution climate models that capture the properties of regional high-impact weather events, such as tropical cyclones, heat wave, and sand and dust storms associated within multi-decadal climate projections of climate variability and change. Unprecedented international collaboration and goodwill are necessary for the success of EPI.