Thursday, November 1, 2012

Sandy's Global Warming Lesson

I heard the first news stories today regarding a linkage of Sandy and global warming. And I suspect there may be some internal debate within climate research as to the whether the odds of this type of storm has been increased because of Arctic warming.

But putting that aside I do think there is a valuable global warming lesson with Sandy. That lesson is that atmospheric models are getting very good. Global warming linkage or no global warming linkage, the atmospheric models that have been developed and run on big computers did an amazing job with this storm. Days in advance the weather models in common usage were predicting this storm with remarkable accuracy.

This was not simply spotting a big storm and saying there is a big storm heading to the coast of New Jersey and Delaware. No this was taking thousands of data points from thousands of miles apart and calculating what would happen. The models came up with a solution that was far from the ordinary. Solutions that would cause one to ask, Could that be right? Indeed the solution, as outrageous as it seemed, was dead on right.

It truly is a good thing that emergency managers and high level politicians took the model solutions seriously and acted well ahead of the storm arrival. Paying heed to the model solutions saved many lives. There can be debate about Sandy and global warming, but the bigger lesson from Sandy is the complex atmospheric modeling efforts are predictive even when solutions outside living memory are predicted. Perhaps Sandy demonstrates that we should pay heed to the climate solutions that climate models are predicting.     

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