Communications of the ACM
Supercomputing Enables Climate Time Machine
Researchers use backwards-facing analysis to determine if their models accurately predict extreme weather conditions that have occurred in the past.
Credit: Chris Perrota
Climate models are improving with each generation of supercomputer, enabling more exact predictions of extreme weather events and global warming.
The effectiveness of a model is sometimes tested retroactively, to determine whether its results would foreshadow real-world events. For example, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory used a backwards-facing analysis in the 20th Century Reanalysis Project. The scientists entered data from extreme global weather events from 1871 to the present day into supercomputers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to develop a virtual climate time machine.
"The model accurately predicted a number of extreme weather conditions, including El Niño occurrences, the 1922 Knickerbocker snowstorm that hit the Atlantic Coast, the 1930s Dust Bowl, and a hurricane that smashed into New York City in 1938," says science writer Jon Bashor.
The researchers then used the data assimilation system for actual predictions to forecast future warming patterns, and thus independently verified that global land warming has been taking place since 1901.
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