Climate Prediction and Research: The Next 20 years
SESSION: Plenary Speakers
EVENT TYPE: Invited Speaker
TIME: 8:30AM - 9:15AM
Speaker(s):Terry Davies
ROOM:Auditorium
ABSTRACT: During the 1980's climate modeling moved from being an academic problem to become the main tool in predicting climate change. Since then with better science and access to more computer power, models have improved significantly. Until now, due to their cost in running for centuries, climate models have been run at relatively low resolution and much of the recent increase in computer power has been used to increase the number of processes e.g. aerosols and the carbon cycle.
To try to predict regional impacts of climate change will require higher resolution but to harness the computer power of the next generation of computers will require more scalable model code. It is likely that many of the existing climate models will need major reformulation involving both algorithms and grids to make best use of massively parallel architectures. Whether this can be done without significant compromises in the science remains an open question.
