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
“…dynamical downscaling…”
I think their spell check messed up. I believe that should read “comical downscaling”.
So 2001-2004 predicts 2057-2059. Since I am most concerned about the next 3 years, 2013-2015, shouldn’t their Super Computer models be able to use Climate data from the 1957-1960 window to tell me this? And to demonstrate their model accuracy, since the data from 2008-2010 has probably been verified and archived, can’t we see how good the fit was based on the 1952-1955 window?
RIF
reading is fundamental
“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.”
Oh NOOOOOO!!!!!!! Six whole days of heat wave rather than four by 2050? Why aren’t we destroying our entire economy and standard of living to prevent this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#########
mean heat wave DURATION. not total heat wave days which is much larger.
the mean heat wave DURATION will increase by two days.
Heat wave Duration is a real killer. Basically as the heat wave gets longer the tmin continues to rise. Today nearly 40 cities in the world operate a heat wave warning system. looking at the historical data for chicao and looking at excess deaths, its pretty clear that
A) there are more than 4 days of heat wave during the summer.
B) the mean heat wave duration is around 4.
C) the longer the heave wave the more people die.
Reading is fundamental. Part of this is brain dead simple and you dont need a super computer to give you a sense of the increased heat waves IFF temperature goes up. One can simply scale temperature and get an answer roughly the same as theirs.
The solutions, however, need not rely on mitigation ( cutting carbon) in fact anything we do now is not likely to effect weather on 2050. Adaptation in the form of better heat wave warning and changes to cities like cool pavements, porous pavements, white and green roofs, and cooling centers for the elderly will reduce deaths. We should be doing that regardless of what climate science says or does not say
Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, not at all interested in environmental outcomes, and Yang Gao, his stooge say that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and only their particular services can save it.
Only a fool would fail to recognise the Kraken causes climate chaos. His appearances also strongly correlate with the prophecies of the Great Orifice who warned Mann of terrible gases.
In light of these shocking revelations of our imminent doom I feel it is only right and proper that Texans* start collecting for the tithe and strapping conspiracy nut Kraken deniers to the rocks.
* I think I’m supposed to blame naughty black gold worshippers and anyone not using Pegusus Airways
/sarc
An amusing post. Any chance we can get these authors to defend their paper here?
We in Aust have had Tim Flannery, a ‘Climate Commissioner’ make predictions regarding rainfall that did not pan out. Rather than fall on his sword when reminded of his predictions and their failure, he reverts to stating that his quotes have been taken out of context.
He reminds us that he said ‘all things being equal’ there will be further droughts/unfilled dams/need for desalination plants/the sky is falling. What he says he meant is that if the exact same conditions occur in the future that are occurring when he makes his ‘predictions’, then what he says will come true. The fact that climate is always changing did not seem to enter into his ‘predictions’. His scaremongering and the effects of his catastrophic announcements on the populace don’t worry him. The money expended based on his doom and gloom view
Perhaps these new ‘predictions’ will also be explained when they don’t occur with statements of ‘we used the best science available’, ‘things changed that we could not have known at the time’, any other excuse for being so certain but not being right.
There’s nothing new in politics. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), when asked by Members of Parliament if his difference engine (mechanical computer) would still provide the right answers even if the wrong figures were entered, replied, “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
The test for their models would be to use the data from 2001 to 2004 to predict the future climate from 2005 to 2008. Did they do that? Of course not – and we all know why.
This is very good news indeed.
This tremendous leap in climate prediction and forecasting capabilities will overcome a very, very long standing problem for the farming community particularly in Australia with our highly variable climate and rainfall.
These scientists will now be able to very accurately predict and forecast for us, the amount of critical rainfall and when we will get it for our grain growing programs next [ southern ] winter and no doubt all the winters following just by using the super computers on the precipitation outcomes of a few years ago.
No more very expensive fertilizers and chemicals and ground preparation when we can now be told when a dry year or drought is coming many years or even decades ahead. And the new machinery brought and the house improvements made when we know absolutely that the seasons a few years ahead will be wet, warm and bumper crop years.
And just imagine how major events like the Olympics. national and international football games, winter snow sporting events, political events and so many other major events of every type can be programmed years or even decades ahead to be located in cities where the predictions of these scientists say that the weather at that time, based on some 4 years of weather and climate data from a half century beforehand will be eminently suitable for such events.
The mind swoons at such immense possibilities in predicting the future weather and climate opened up by the research efforts of these gentlemen.
Much more and very generous funding should immediately be made available to these researchers.
Damn! [/SARC ] or is it [ /CRAP ] just doesn’t seem to quite cover this development!
So it’s going to rain more in the southeast. That is a good thing, isn’t it? They’ve been in a drought in the past few years.
Anyone tracking these absurdities on (say) a quarterly basis, just to ensure that the usual Green Gang gobblygook doesn’t ooze too freely through the cracks? What statisticians genially term “the fallacy of inferred precision” is so rampant here that a teaser interval or two would be extremely apropos.
Would anyone care to take a bet that all the Green super computers are being used outside office hours by avid green gamers who are the same ones who move with impossible speed in the pvp shoot em ups and really spoil your fun?
Lets us pick a period of just 3/4 years from an El Nino to La Nina plus another forming and extrapolate that in future for a similar period in 50 years. Therefore because of the weather changes between El NIno and La Nina the illustration below shows regions are going to get much more severe. (mainly colder, wetter and drier)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/La_Nina_regional_impacts.gif
What a load of nonsense of course and all that has been done here is the change of weather from La Nina to El Nino and suggested this will worsen in future for a similar period in 50 years. Does it get any worse than this in climate pseudoscience, NO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:El_Nino_regional_impacts.gif
Difference above (mainly warmer, wetter and drier)
Hence, this model has based worse climate in future on just an ENSO change of weather in regions from La Nina to El Nino.
I read this PR last week and dismissed it as more wishful thinking and modeling craziness. I might suggest goat guts (or choose any animal you like) are probably as accurate as this model and all the computing power in the world won’t make up for the lack of understanding and assumptions that go into it.
I agree the press release is poorly written and even comical. But from the paper itself – freely available as someone else pointed out – it seems like the researchers are making some valuable progress in regional climate modeling. Whether warming is human caused or good or bad it is likely going to be helpful to have better regional modeling. This was the first paper to report on a new approach. So hopefully further work will give us a better idea of how useful it may be.
If people have any interest in science they might read the paper and then discuss it instead of making fun of a press release.
Buzzed,
Define “valuable progress”.
Valuable for whom? ☺
Mosh,
You have said that the idea of extreme climate is the new normal, the new consensus, and I see little effort on your part to resist that new hype. I agree with what you write above about heatwaves, except- why even reply rationally to absurd (and untestable) claims about weather conditions 50 years in the future. Academics, and I’ve been one, don’t deserve recognition for National Enquirer or Nostradamus type predictions. ROF is more appropriate for the BPU set.
Input data and assumptions.
The computers are always “correct”. The questioning is for the data and assumptions, the two things the MSM and liberal arts don’t understand has uncertainties. But they love computers. Just don’t understand them, either.
The GIGO thing doesn’t mean much to the lovers of Apple5, especially to Twitter/McKibben followers.
Steven Mosher
Dec. 7, 2012 at 2:38 p.m. says:
“RIF…”
Funny! And statistics is even funnier! A statistic like mean heat wave duration is MEANINGLESS. Why? Because heat wave duration is bounded on the lower side by zero and not bounded on the upper side. So therefore the distribution for small values of heat wave DURATION would be what? Log Normal perhaps, or Weibull? You pick. In any regard the summary statistic for central tendency would not be the mean, more likely median. Small detail perhaps but hey, the devil’s always in the details especially for models that got out for decades with ridiculously small confidence intervals and significant figures.
And with that error I’m going to believe their computer model beyond 2057 for any proclamation? Tell me why I should based on this most elementary failure?
Buzzed says:
December 17, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Regional climate understanding is a step in the right direction, but not in this way over a too short period from an La NIna to El Nino. This tells us nothing about the regional climates background behavior not influenced by El Nino or La NIna. Therefore it is impossible to use this in 50 years time and claim a solution.The best way to go about this is to show how regional climate in eastern USA behaves on the long term without ENSO influence.
This “crystal ball” they’re talking about — is that one of those black crystal balls with a big number 8 on it?
Yep, University of Tennessee, probably right up there with MIT and Cal Tech in science and technology, ha, ha ha, wait, they probably are when it comes to climate science.
Fu, that’s a Mayan name isn’t it?
On the other hand … maybe these guys are simply brilliant. By taking the results of GCMs to the next level they highlight the stupidity inherent in the belief in climate models. No one can seriously believe these results since no one can predict our weather more than a few days in the future. Instead of laughing at these guys we should be congratulating them on their insight.