From the University of Tennessee at Knoxville this gives a whole new meaning to “release the Kraken”.
University of Tennessee study predicts extreme climate in Eastern US
Results show the region will be hotter and wetter
From extreme drought to super storms, many wonder what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does away with the guessing.
Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.
Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.
The study found that heat waves will become more severe in most regions of the eastern United States and, that both the Northeast and Southeast will see a drastic increase in precipitation.
The findings are published in the Nov. 6 edition of Environmental Research Letters.
Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world), the researchers combined high-resolution topography, land use information and climate modeling. Then they used dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results. Dynamical downscaling allowed the researchers to develop climate scales as small as four square kilometers.
“Instead of studying regions, which is not useful when examining extreme weather, dynamical downscaling allows us to study small areas such as cities with a fine resolution,” said Fu, who is also a professor within the UT-ORNL Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education (CIRE).
The researchers evaluated extreme events along with daily maximum and minimum temperatures and daily precipitation. For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059. This is the first study to predict heat waves for the top 20 cities in the eastern U.S. For example, Nashville will see a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius.
In comparing present climate to future, the researchers found that heat waves will become more severe throughout the eastern part of the nation. The Northeast and eastern Midwest will experience a greater increase in heat waves than the Southeast, which will almost equalize the temperatures between the future North and current South.
“Currently, the mean heat wave duration is about four days in the Northeast and eastern Midwest and five days in the Southeast,” said Fu. “By the end of the 2050s, the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”
In addition, the Northeast and eastern Midwest are likely to suffer from steeper increases in the severity of heat waves.
“While the Southeast has the highest intensity in heat waves, the northeast is likely to experience the highest increase,” said Fu. “We are looking at temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, with New York experiencing the highest hike.”
Both the Northeast and Southeast will experience an increase of precipitation of 35 percent or more. Most coastal states will see the greatest increase, of about 150 millimeters a year. Taking into consideration heat waves and extreme precipitation, the Northeast shows the largest increases in precipitation. This suggests a greater risk of flooding.
“It is important that the nation take actions to mitigate the impact of climate change in the next several decades,” said Fu. “These changes not only cost money—about a billion a year in the U.S.—but they also cost lives.”
Fu and Gao collaborated with researchers at Emory University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They received assistance from the National Center for Computational Sciences, the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, that when they get this supercomputer online at Oak Ridge, it will take even more guesswork out of climate and weather prediction. – Anthony
This is a joke –right?
About the only thing I agree with and about as accurate as using a crystal ball.
I’m sure they will have no problem at all telling me who will win the next 50 Super Bowls.
Well, this looks conclusive to me. How can they possibly be wrong if they have used not one, but TWO supercomputers? 😉
Astrology, pure and simple. Boy I’m glad my taxpayers dough didn’t’ fund this nonsense.
Well – the computer doesn’t make mistakes. Glad that’s settled, Now they can use the computer time on something else. Nothing to see here folks, – move along.
Well FU, I thought we were going to be declining in temperature. So FU on this report.
Wow.
I wonder if I could ask them to predict the winners of the seven races at Folkestone tomorrow.
http://www.attheraces.com/allcards.aspx?meetingid=57312&date=2012-12-18&ref=atrfixtures
A betting coup like that would help my pre-Christmas finances no end, and these guys have such great accuracy even forty years out that it should be a very easy problem for them.
/sarc
“For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059.”
Let me see if I have this straight. They analysed 4 years of “climate” and then proceeded to project out fifty years into the future, to a precision of 0.1 C. Yeah…yeah…I could see how that could work…
JIC/ SARC!!!
“Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world)…”
together with
“…dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results.”
Gosh! Words fail me.
For funding, Fu fibs.
Katharine Hayhoe produced similar alarmism in her “North East Climate Impacts Assessment” a couple of years ago.
However her claims that such changes were already happening did not stand up to scrutiny.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/katharines-northeast-climate-impacts-assessment/
Using the world’s fastest computers means of course that when required by the “cause”, we can process larger amounts of garbage even faster.
Based on 4 years of data they predict the climate 50 years hence?
Why 50 years? If they can be so accurate in 50 years with just 4 years of data, surely they could produce something in the 10 year range? You know, something that could be shown to be true one way or another before all their pay cheques have been cashed and they’re sitting on their derrier’s collecting retirement benefits and being smug about how they ripped of the public with research so blatantly fictional that their administration is too embarrassed to call them out on it for fear of being asked how the h*ll is was allowed to be published in the first place.
“For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059.”
=====
It must be true. They used a supercomputer!
I wonder if their program would be able to accurately predict the climate for 1957 to 1959 using the data for 1901 to 1904? I sincerely doubt it.
“This is the first study to predict heat waves…”
Hmm. Sure I’ve heard something like that before.
Perhaps GIGO should be renamed GaoFu “Garbage accepted = output F…”
(you can fill in the blanks)
How about a snow/rain/drought/flood/hot/cold snow globe with a secret selector dial to show these different conditions – Then the likes of Joshua Fu and Yang Gao, can always say they are and they will be right with a flick of a secret switch.
We could have one in every climate department grant seeking university and of course a huge one in the Ministry of Truth (EPA/UN) located in the grand entrance hall.
Who could argue with such irrefutable evidence?
USHCN example at Charlotteberg, a rural station in NJ.
This graph is the distribution of daily max temps 1893-2011. Top temps are not as high as the 1930’s and show no upward trend (although, as with most of these things, temps are higher than the colder 1960’s + 70’s)
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=281582&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_boxtclim_yr2011.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=TMAX&pyear=year&xyear=year&minyear=1893&maxyear=2011
The faith that people have in what comes out of a computer is stunning. But this is nothing new. I wrote my first computer programs in 1980 and was surprised then as to how people simply trusted any result that a computer produced.
Just as long as when these alarmist predictions fail to materialise the fools get shown the door and have to retake their PhDs…
Some sort of responsibility and accountability should be expected after all.
In other news, European researchers quietly announce simultaneously the discovery of the Higgs Boson and demonstration of continuous cold-fusion. A spokesman for the researchers said, “We have supercomputers, too.”
Looks to me that all UT has done is to describe hotter Urban Heat Islands. They speak of the cities as being hotter. What about the countryside? Will the rural areas 50 miles upwind of the cities be any hotter according to this study?
“… developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.”
April Fools!
“Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world),”
Complete waste of super computing power.
Louis says: “It must be true. They used a supercomputer!”
Supercomputers enable one to make more and bigger mistakes, Faster! 😉