I was wondering if climateprediction.net included hurricanes as a part of it\'s model since pressure is one of the parameters monitored. I\'m certain it would be very difficult to model these predictably (even models dedicated to hurricanes can\'t do it very predictably), but I would imagine that these are very important features as they pertain to global climate changes since they move such a tremendous amount of energy from one place to another - Ocean currents moving warm water to the poles/cold water to the equator, and hurricanes pulling heat energy out of the ocean and moving it over land.

What I really want to know is will I see a rather localized very low pressure system move across the Atlantic from N. Africa to the Caribbean, monsoons hitting India, or Typhoons hitting Japan? Is this too complicated for the current model, or is the grid just too coarse to see one of these storms?

The key word is \'localised\' - the model\'s granularity is too large to be able to see hurricanes. What it will do is identify hurricane-prone conditions.

Even the SAP model wasn\'t fine-grain enough to see hurricanes, and the SAP model took two weeks of computer time for one model year.

The ocean is included in the coupled model (if you watch when it\'s running, there\'s an ocean phase).

---

I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

Thanks Mike. Great info! Are these types of energy exchanges accounted for in these models or are they expected to average out?

Also, I am modestly familiar with the theory relating the efficiency of the \"Trans-oceanic Conveyer\"/\"Ocean Conveyer Belt\" and ocean salinity. I wouldn\'t imagine that a 120 year model would include this as a variable, but is climateprediction.net thinking of doing a longer term simulation that investigates this, or is the science not established well enough?

The Thermohaline Circulation was investigated back in 2003-4.
See this page and this page

The \"story so far\", can be read about here.

The section: Publications and talks by members of the climateprediction.net team
contains a huge amount of material, or links to it.
Then there\'s the Open Day 2006 presentation, (which contains both text and video) here.

Hi, Chris,

Actually, these are 160-year Models, 80 Hindcast and 80 Forecast. In addition to data/experience accumulated from thousands of Runs since mid-2003, each Model has input data selected from a set of 200-year TCM \"Spinup\" Runs some of us ran in preparation for this phase of the experiment. See the list of files in your projects\\climateprediction.net folder, which include a pair each for nnnn_flux_corr.anc and nnnn_ocean.year. (There are 61 different scenarios, one unperturbed and 60 with various perturbations.) These inputs are in addition to Ozone and Sulphur perturbations, among others. The science team included a lot...

Les\' links provide a good overview of the process. We may be running on PCs but this is a model developed to run on Cray supercomputers. Your machine is doing a lot...

Happy 2007, all.

---

"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

Thanks a lot guys. Good info!