{"id":1900,"date":"2007-01-16T16:40:56","date_gmt":"2007-01-16T21:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=1900"},"modified":"2014-12-16T16:41:32","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T21:41:32","slug":"toward-reliable-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2007\/01\/toward-reliable-forecast\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward a More Reliable Forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"\"19\"<\/a>\n

In the last century, the Earth has gotten warmer \u2026 fast. Glaciers are melting in the Arctic\u2014 swallowing islands, drowning polar bears, and changing regional patterns of ocean circulation. With techniques weathermen have been using for 30 years, today\u2019s climatologists have just begun to forecast these changing ocean currents. And, as of now, their models\u2019 predictive value\u2014like the morning weather report\u2014 leaves much to be desired. But now, an applied mathematician from the Whiting School and a physical oceanographer from Hopkins\u2019 Krieger School of Arts and Sciences are joining forces to tackle this problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur ultimate goal, really, is to figure out what\u2019s going to happen to the climate in the critically sensitive region of the North Atlantic,\u201d says the Whiting School\u2019s Greg Eyink, professor of applied mathematics and statistics.<\/p>\n

The cooling and sinking of water in the Earth\u2019s polar regions is critical to large-scale ocean circulation across the globe. In this \u201cglobal conveyor belt,\u201d heated water from the equator moves north toward the Arctic, where it releases heat into the atmosphere. After the release the water is cooler, and denser, so that it sinks downward, returns south, upwells back to the surface, and repeats the cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis overturning circulation has a substantial effect on northwest European climate,\u201d explains the Krieger School\u2019s Tom Haine, professor of physical oceanography in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Norway, for instance, lies within the warm northward current of the North Atlantic, making the Norwegian climate several degrees warmer than say, Greenland, which is at the same latitude.<\/p>\n

But recent global warming might be slowing down the Atlantic part of the conveyor belt. When freshwater glaciers melt in the Arctic, the water becomes much less salty, and thus much less dense, and much slower to sink to the bottom. The effects on climate are difficult to predict with confidence. But they could be substantial, perhaps involving rapid cooling of northern Europe by up to several degrees Celsius.<\/p>\n

Policy-makers would like to predict these local climate changes. For the last few years, Haine has made studies of the North Atlantic using data assimilation technology, which combines many kinds of data, sampled at different times and locations, coupled with state-of-theart ocean models. \u201cData assimilation has been used in atmospheric science for 30 years,\u201d Haine says, \u201cparticularly when people make forecasts of the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which begs the question, jokes Eyink, \u201cof just how well is this going to work?\u201d He says most of the forecasting strategies so far, including Haine\u2019s, come up with simple predictions of the most likely behavior, without any idea of how uncertain that prediction is.<\/p>\n

But the pair has just begun a new project\u2014 which applies some of Eyink\u2019s sophisticated statistical techniques to Haine\u2019s data assimilation system\u2014to quantify these uncertainties. Eyink compares it to making weather predictions: \u201cInstead of saying that tomorrow the weather will be 80 degrees,\u201d he explains, \u201cwe\u2019d like to say there\u2019s a 90 percent probability that it will be within five degrees of 80.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the big picture may seem simple, \u201cthese are challenging computational problems,\u201d Haine says. \u201cYou move slowly, incrementally. But I\u2019m very hopeful that these will be revolutionary ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team doesn\u2019t expect to have initial results for at least a year. They\u2019ll need to develop codes and prepare data sets for high-powered supercomputers. And just one experiment might take a supercomputer a month to compute. \u201cData assimilation is painstaking, and very labor intensive,\u201d Haine says.<\/p>\n

Still, Haine and Eyink are both happy to be part of the unique collaboration. \u201cIn other places I\u2019ve worked it\u2019s not been possible,\u201d Haine says. But at Hopkins, he says, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of cross-department mixing.\u201d Eyink agrees, saying it wouldn\u2019t be possible to demonstrate the usefulness of his abstractions, \u201cwithout someone like Tom to give them flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last century, the Earth has gotten warmer \u2026 fast. Glaciers are melting in the Arctic\u2014 swallowing islands, drowning polar bears, and changing regional patterns of ocean circulation. With techniques weathermen have been using for 30 years, today\u2019s climatologists have just begun to forecast these changing ocean currents. And, as of now, their models\u2019…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-development","issue-winter-2007"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nToward a More Reliable Forecast - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2007\/01\/toward-reliable-forecast\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Toward a More Reliable Forecast - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the last century, the Earth has gotten warmer \u2026 fast. 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