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
SAMURAI says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Model, model on the wall,
Who’s the scariest of them all…
Fu me once, same on Fu. Fu me twice, shame on Fu, too….
Let’s see….. If you double this, tweak that, ignore this, square that, don’t even consider that thing over there, times 35 years….. PRESTO!! Warmaggedon!!
Just what my patrons paying for the study requested…
Isn’t *sigh*ence great!…..
Didn’t Fu get the memo that 1) no warming trend in 16 years and 2) there’s no statistical correlation between CO2/extreme weather?… Oh….right… “IF you double this, tweak that, ignore this…..Sorry….my bad….
[Same shame on me? ]
*
Samurai, you have a way with words. I enjoyed your post very much. 🙂
Civil and environmental engineering!!! You all know that civil engineering has been renamed environmental engineering in most Universities for promotional reasons, right? What in the dickens are they letting a bunch of soil mechanics, concrete designers and highway curve surveyors doing anywhere near a super computer! What are their physics/chemistry skills? No wonder I have hair dressers and brick layers arguing with me about global warming and psychologists and sociologists castigating me for my skepticism and offering psychoanalysis of my illness.
With the increasing number of super computers required to maintain credibility in the face of more and more contrary empirical evidence, the heat output of these super-computer behemoths will indeed raise temperatures to the required predicted level.
No, B.Klein simply no.
Unless you and your ‘party’ are prepared to totally, emphatically and factually refute the field of IR Spectroscopy … you know, gas molecule interaction with EM (electromagnetic) energy?
.
I am confident that when these two researchers read the peer review comments on WUWT they are not going to be happy. Somewhere along the research trail one needs to apply common sense to the results. It is always a wake up call.
“…they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059…”
I haven’t laughed so hard in a very long time. Kudos to these guys for the belly laughs.
Bob Kutz says: Well, at least they were smart enough not to predict anything we can check in the next 10 years.
AndyG55 says: They really need to learn the difference between artifical intelligence, and natural stupidity !!!
Eric H. says: Well, I couldn’t get time on a super computer so I had to resort to the next best thing.
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi
I asked the 8 ball this question: Question: Will the weather be 3 degrees hotter in 2050?
Mark and two Cats says: Super Computers: Garbage in —-> Super Garbage Out
Rick K says: On the other hand, I see that April 13, 2049 in Chattanooga will be sunny, light winds of 4.2 mph from the NNE with a temperature of 68.23 F between 2:12 pm and 3:07 pm. Not bad…
Snotrocket says: I do hope they took into account parasitic oscillations caused by interstage feedback of the Eccles-Jordan mono-stable double-diode flip-flop.
I have no problem trusting the results produced by a computer. They do what they’re told. I don’t trust the programmers as far as could comfortably spit out a rat, though.
Climate Science has always required Super Computers to do their work. I guess to make up for their below average abilities. These guys think that they can forecast climate 50 years in the future in a 60 year cycle system. Even a super computer can not make up for their mental insufficiency pg.
The Kraken Blushes
“For me the starting point is to recognize the system for what it is – a non linear dynamical dissipative system perpetually out of equilibrium and never in steady state.
Finally the important conclusion is that such a system is deterministic but unpredictable, i.e. (sic) you cannot find a unique solution for the non linear partial equations describing it.
This is an impossibility of principle – it doesn’t matter what is the power of computers or the accuracy of the numerical models.”
Tomas Milanovic
The computers will produce a result but it will be meaningless. He also discussed the possibility that the system may be predictable iff it is ergodic. Which no one is even investigating.
And they’d get that wrong half the time too.
I find this hilarious! .. they were just telling us (here in Nashville) this past summer that we were all doomed from “permanent drought” … good grief! … give me an F’ing break already….
Bob Newart says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:18 pm
while everyone has been sitting on their asses someone has actually gotten the solution set.
And all everyone here can do is sour grapes!!!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Take a look at where the earth’s temperature is headed.
graph 1 and graph 2
A drop in temperature of ~-0.3C make a lot more sense that this idiocy. Long term we are headed back into an ice age conditions or pretty darn close to ice age conditions. [ link 1 and link 2 ] The Holocene peaked in temperature 8000 years ago and the earth has been cooling since then in fits and starts. An increase of 3C is the entire temperature swing in the Holocene from the peak to the present. It just ain’t going to happen in the next fifty years.
If you look at it another way, the ice age to interglacial temperature swing is ~ 10C and the other interglacials peaked at perhaps a degree higher than the peak of the Holocene.
This paper just doesn’t pass the common sense test. That is why we are ROTFL
Gary Pearse says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Civil and environmental engineering!!! You all know that civil engineering has been renamed environmental engineering in most Universities for promotional reasons, right?
———————————–
When I was an engineering undergrad, it was well known by all engineering students that civil was the place where people went if they were not bright enough to be real engineers, mind you, they were still smarter than the artsies, but not by much by our thinking…
Stephen Pruett says:
“I would be interested in hearing specific evidence-based criticisms of the paper.”
Ok, the evidence currently shows no trend in NC precipitation or extreme events yet they’re projecting an increase in extreme rainfall.
http://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/climate/climate_change
How about methodological objections?
1) Calibration period too short.
2) Verification period way too short.
3) Why not verify half century scale projections with half century scale data?
How about objections to unsupported conclusions like my comment above or self aggrandizements like “The regional climate dynamical downscaling technique has been successfully applied to CESM results for the RCP 8.5 climate change scenario to generate high resolution climate outputs.” What could possibly define successful if not the test of predictive skill proved out by time and future reality, surely the mere production of fancy projections aren’t the bar for success in this field?
Jeff Alberts says: “I have no problem trusting the results produced by a computer.”
You should not even trust a computer.
Remember Pentium FDIV bug?
I have seen a bug in a computer system that caused inaccuracies in a long-term model – go undetected for four-years.
Trust, but verify – on a different computer system.
Be prepared for differences caused by different compilers, libraries, and platform “features”.
Unless this turns out to be an intended joke as compared to the unintended one that D. Dooley was as head coach of the UT Football program my UT stickers and front vanity plate are coming off tomorrow.
Unless this is intended as a joke as compared to the unintended joke that D. Dooley turned out to be as head coach of the UT football program my UT stickers and front vanity plate will be coming off my car.
What concerns me most is that this was peer reviewed and published. There is no hope at all if this parallel to the excrement of an animal that produces beef is passed unquestioned. Fu ***** sake…
Wow, what are the odds of getting that right?
The lottery comes to mind 🙂
I prefer using a different method for such extrapolation.
Just sayin, the University of Tennessee probably has the same odds of accuracy that were produced by an old school method, no?
Climate video games! Violent ones at that!
This is so incredibly ridiculous that it must have been done as a spoof of the entire peer review and publishing program related to “climate science”. At least I hope so.
GIGO
Tennessians should stick to what they know best – making great Whiskey.
Oh, I see: Fu and Gao had too much of it, while they ran their computer-game.
Perhaps I should copyright the “Fugao”-brand?
Lucky for them, their computers came up with the right answer. What if they’d shown that in fact nothing much would have changed in 50 years? No more floods, no more droughts. They’d have looked a bit silly.