Predicting the weather in the next century

Marisa O’Neil

While most people watch the evening news to see if they’ll need their

umbrella the next day, researchers on campus are predicting the

weather 300 years from now.

A new $1-million supercomputer in UC Irvine’s department of earth

system science creates models to simulate global climate conditions

hundreds of years from now. Unlike the local weather forecast, it

gives a worldwide, long-term overview.

“We’re not doing the five-day forecast,” said Charlie Zender,

assistant professor of earth system science. “We’re doing the

five-month forecast, the five-year forecast, the 50-year forecast.”

UCI earth system science researchers will use the Earth System

Modeling Facility, which Zender likes to call the “virtual climate

time machine,” to predict overall trends and potential effects of

global warming. It will provide them a general picture, not all the

specifics.

“Our climate forecast tells you what the average daytime

temperature or average minimum overnight temperature might be,”

Zender said. “It’s not going to tell you if it’s going to rain on

your birthday 10 years from now.”

By using past climactic information, current conditions and

projected greenhouse gas emissions, they can predict things such as

the frequency of El Nino events. They are also looking for signs of

rapid climate shifts -- global warming or ice ages -- which have

historically taken place in as little as 10 years, Zender said.

The department purchased the IBM supercomputer with money from a

National Science Foundation grant.

Once the domain of government agencies, supercomputing is starting

to hit the relative mainstream, said Dave Turek, vice president of

deep computing at IBM. UCI’s new computer consists of seven servers

linked together that work as a single system, rather than the

behemoth room-sized supercomputers of days past.

“Supercomputers are pretty ubiquitous and far reaching,” Turek

said. “They’re no longer restricted to the purview of the scientists

you might remember from the science-fiction movies of the 1960s and

‘70s.”

The UCI computer is 528 gigaflops, meaning it can run 528 billion

calculations in one second. Turek ranked it as one of the top 400

supercomputers in the world.

Its use will be devoted to climate research, Zender said, and

eight groups will test their hypotheses on it and write papers based

on its findings. He expects calculations for each project to take

about a week.

“On a per-professor basis, this computer gives UCI more power than

probably any other facility in the country to attack this problem,”

he said. “All the [research] groups include graduate students, so

they can learn the nuts and bolts of climate research from the

beginning to the end.”