Tag Archives: emic

Milestones

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You may have already heard that carbon dioxide concentrations have surpassed 400 ppm. The most famous monitoring station, Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, reached this value on May 9th. Due to the seasonal cycle, CO2 levels began to decline almost immediately thereafter, but next year they will easily blow past 400 ppm.

Of course, this milestone is largely arbitrary. There’s nothing inherently special about 400 ppm. But it’s a good reminder that while we were arguing about taxation, CO2 levels continued to quietly tick up and up.

In happier news, John Cook and others have just published the most exhaustive survey of the peer-reviewed climate literature to date. Read the paper here (open access), and a detailed but accessible summary here. Unsurprisingly, they found the same 97% consensus that has come up over and over again.

Cook et al read the abstracts of nearly 12 000 papers published between 1991 and 2011 – every single hit from the ISI Web of Science with the keywords “global climate change” or “global warming”. Several different people categorized each abstract, and the authors were contacted whenever possible to categorize their own papers. Using several different methods like this makes the results more reliable.

Around two-thirds of the studies, particularly the more recent ones, didn’t mention the cause of climate change. This is unsurprising, since human-caused warming has been common knowledge in the field for years. Similarly, seismology papers don’t usually mention that plate tectonics cause earthquakes, particularly in the abstracts where space is limited.

Among the papers which did express a position, 97.1% said climate change was human-caused. Again, unsurprising to anyone working in the field, but it’s news to many members of the public. The study has been widely covered in the mainstream media – everywhere from The Guardian to The Australian – and even President Obama’s Twitter feed.

Congratulations are also due to Andrew Weaver, my supervisor from last summer, who has just been elected to the British Columbia provincial legislature. He is not only the first-ever Green Party MLA in BC’s history, but also (as far as I know) the first-ever climate scientist to hold public office.

Governments the world over are sorely in need of officials who actually understand the problem of climate change. Nobody fits this description better than Andrew, and I think he is going to be great. The large margin by which he won also indicates that public support for climate action is perhaps higher than we thought.

Finally, my second publication came out this week in Climate of the Past. It describes an EMIC intercomparison project the UVic lab conducted for the next IPCC report, which I helped out with while I was there. The project was so large that we split the results into two papers (the second of which is in press in Journal of Climate). This paper covers the historical experiments – comparing model results from 850-2005 to observations and proxy reconstructions – as well as some idealized experiments designed to measure metrics such as climate sensitivity, transient climate response, and carbon cycle feedbacks.

Climate Change and Atlantic Circulation

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Today my very first scientific publication is appearing in Geophysical Research Letters. During my summer at UVic, I helped out with a model intercomparison project regarding the effect of climate change on Atlantic circulation, and was listed as a coauthor on the resulting paper. I suppose I am a proper scientist now, rather than just a scientist larva.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC for short) is an integral part of the global ocean conveyor belt. In the North Atlantic, a massive amount of water near the surface, cooling down on its way to the poles, becomes dense enough to sink. From there it goes on a thousand-year journey around the world – inching its way along the bottom of the ocean, looping around Antarctica – before finally warming up enough to rise back to the surface. A whole multitude of currents depend on the AMOC, most famously the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe pleasantly warm.

Some have hypothesized that climate change might shut down the AMOC: the extra heat and freshwater (from melting ice) coming into the North Atlantic could conceivably lower the density of surface water enough to stop it sinking. This happened as the world was coming out of the last ice age, in an event known as the Younger Dryas: a huge ice sheet over North America suddenly gave way, drained into the North Atlantic, and shut down the AMOC. Europe, cut off from the Gulf Stream and at the mercy of the ice-albedo feedback, experienced another thousand years of glacial conditions.

A shutdown today would not lead to another ice age, but it could cause some serious regional cooling over Europe, among other impacts that we don’t fully understand. Today, though, there’s a lot less ice to start with. Could the AMOC still shut down? If not, how much will it weaken due to climate change? So far, scientists have answered these two questions with “probably not” and “something like 25%” respectively. In this study, we analysed 30 climate models (25 complex CMIP5 models, and 5 smaller, less complex EMICs) and came up with basically the same answer. It’s important to note that none of the models include dynamic ice sheets (computational glacial dynamics is a headache and a half), which might affect our results.

Models ran the four standard RCP experiments from 2006-2100. Not every model completed every RCP, and some extended their simulations to 2300 or 3000. In total, there were over 30 000 model years of data. We measured the “strength” of the AMOC using the standard unit Sv (Sverdrups), where each Sv is 1 million cubic metres of water per second.

Only two models simulated an AMOC collapse, and only at the tail end of the most extreme scenario (RCP8.5, which quite frankly gives me a stomachache). Bern3D, an EMIC from Switzerland, showed a MOC strength of essentially zero by the year 3000; CNRM-CM5, a GCM from France, stabilized near zero by 2300. In general, the models showed only a moderate weakening of the AMOC by 2100, with best estimates ranging from a 22% drop for RCP2.6 to a 40% drop for RCP8.5 (with respect to preindustrial conditions).

Are these somewhat-reassuring results trustworthy? Or is the Atlantic circulation in today’s climate models intrinsically too stable? Our model intercomparison also addressed that question, using a neat little scalar metric known as Fov: the net amount of freshwater travelling from the AMOC to the South Atlantic.

The current thinking in physical oceanography is that the AMOC is more or less binary – it’s either “on” or “off”. When AMOC strength is below a certain level (let’s call it A), its only stable state is “off”, and the strength will converge to zero as the currents shut down. When AMOC strength is above some other level (let’s call it B), its only stable state is “on”, and if you were to artificially shut it off, it would bounce right back up to its original level. However, when AMOC strength is between A and B, both conditions can be stable, so whether it’s on or off depends on where it started. This phenomenon is known as hysteresis, and is found in many systems in nature.

This figure was not part of the paper. I made it just now in MS Paint.

Here’s the key part: when AMOC strength is less than A or greater than B, Fov is positive and the system is monostable. When AMOC strength is between A and B, Fov is negative and the system is bistable. The physical justification for Fov is its association with the salt advection feedback, the sign of which is opposite Fov: positive Fov means the salt advection feedback is negative (i.e. stabilizing the current state, so monostable); a negative Fov means the salt advection feedback is positive (i.e. reinforcing changes in either direction, so bistable).

Most observational estimates (largely ocean reanalyses) have Fov as slightly negative. If models’ AMOCs really were too stable, their Fov‘s should be positive. In our intercomparison, we found both positives and negatives – the models were kind of all over the place with respect to Fov. So maybe some models are overly stable, but certainly not all of them, or even the majority.

As part of this project, I got to write a new section of code for the UVic model, which calculated Fov each timestep and included the annual mean in the model output. Software development on a large, established project with many contributors can be tricky, and the process involved a great deal of head-scratching, but it was a lot of fun. Programming is so satisfying.

Beyond that, my main contribution to the project was creating the figures and calculating the multi-model statistics, which got a bit unwieldy as the model count approached 30, but we made it work. I am now extremely well-versed in IDL graphics keywords, which I’m sure will come in handy again. Unfortunately I don’t think I can reproduce any figures here, as the paper’s not open-access.

I was pretty paranoid while coding and doing calculations, though – I kept worrying that I would make a mistake, never catch it, and have it dredged out by contrarians a decade later (“Kate-gate”, they would call it). As a climate scientist, I suppose that comes with the job these days. But I can live with it, because this stuff is just so darned interesting.

Summer Research

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I recently started working for the summer, with Andrew Weaver’s research group at the University of Victoria. If you’re studying climate modelling in Canada, this is the place to be. They are a fairly small group, but continually churn out world-class research.

Many of the projects here use the group’s climate model, the UVic ESCM (Earth System Climate Model). I am working with the ESCM this summer, and have previously read most of the code, so I feel pretty well acquainted with it.

The climate models that most people are familiar with are the really complex ones. GCMs (General Circulation Models or Global Climate Models, depending on who you talk to) use high resolution, a large number of physical processes, and relatively few parameterizations to emulate the climate system as realistically as possible. These are the models that take weeks to run on the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

EMICs (Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity) are a step down in complexity. They run at a lower resolution than GCMs and have more paramaterizations. Individual storms and wind patterns (and sometimes ocean currents as well) typically are not resolved – instead, the model predicts the statistics of these phenomena. Often, at least one component (such as sea ice) is two-dimensional.

The UVic ESCM is one of the most complex EMICs – it really sits somewhere between a GCM and an EMIC. It has a moderately high resolution, with a grid of 3.6° longitude by 1.8° latitude (ten thousand squares in all), and 19 vertical layers in the ocean. Its ocean, land, and sea ice component would all belong in a GCM. It even has a sediment component, which simulates processes that most GCMs ignore.

The only reason that the UVic model is considered an EMIC is because of its atmosphere component. This part of the model is two-dimensional and parameterizes most processes. For example, clouds aren’t explicitly simulated – instead, as soon as the relative humidity of a region reaches 85%, the atmospheric moisture falls out as rain (or snow). You would never see this kind of atmosphere in a GCM, and it might seem strange for scientists to deliberately build an unrealistic model. However, this simplified atmosphere gives the UVic ESCM a huge advantage over GCMs: speed.

For example, today I tested out the model with an example simulation. It ran on a Linux cluster with 32 cores, which I accessed remotely from a regular desktop. It took about 7 minutes of real time to simulate each year and record annual averages for several dozen variables. In comparison, many GCMs take an entire day of real time to simulate a year, while running on a machine with thousands of cores. Most of this work is coming from the atmospheric component, which requires short time steps. Consequently, cutting down on complexity in the atmosphere gives the best return on model efficiency.

Because the UVic model is so fast, it’s suitable for very long runs. Simulating a century is an “overnight job”, and several millennia is no big deal (especially if you run it on WestGrid). As a result, long-term processes have come to dominate the research in this lab: carbon cycle feedbacks, sensitivity studies, circulation in the North Atlantic. It simply isn’t feasible to simulate these millennial-scale processes on a GCM – so, by sacrificing complexity, we’re able to open up brand new areas of research. Perfectly emulating the real world isn’t actually the goal of most climate modelling.

Of course, the UVic ESCM is imperfect. Like all models, it has its quirks – an absolute surface temperature that’s a bit too low, projections of ocean heat uptake that are a bit too high. It doesn’t give reliable projections of regional climate, so you can only really use globally or hemispherically averaged quantities. It’s not very good at decadal-scale projection. However, other models are suitable for these short-term and small-scale simulations: the same GCMs that suffer when it comes to speed. In this way, climate models perform “division of labour”. By developing many different models of varying complexity, we can make better use of the limited computer power available to us.

I have several projects lined up for the summer, and right now I’m reading a lot of papers to familiarize myself with the relevant sub-fields. There have been some really cool discoveries in the past few years that I wasn’t aware of. I have lots of ideas for posts to write about these papers, as well as the projects I’m involved in, so check back often!