Content about Atmospheric science

  Feature - GRelC @ Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science, founded by working climate scientists—mostly from Columbia University's Lamont-Dohery Earth Observatory— written for the general public. Image courtesy of RealClimate Drowning in data Talk to any climate scientist, and they’ll tell you that one of their biggest problems is dealing with the sheer volume of data they acquire when dealing with something as complex as worldwide climate change. They don’t lack for sources of data; if anything, they have too much to choose from—everything from tree ring data to ice cores to collections of air samples from hot-air balloons. With this in mind, managing the metadata can be a bottleneck. But  distributed, peer-to-peer and grid-enabled solutions can help to provide a secure, decentralized, transparent and scalable solution for managing petabytes of datasets spread among several sites, say researchers at the EuroMediterranean Center f

  Feature - Powerful pollution model moves to the grid High ozone levels threaten Bulgaria’s most important agricultural crop, wheat, with yields down by ten to twenty percent.Image courtesy Tzvetan Ostromsky In January 2008, Bulgarian authorities installed a public air pollution monitoring system in Sofia, the country’s capital. The system allows passing citizens to check air quality and keeps authorities informed of current pollution levels.  Computer scientist Tzvetan Ostromsky is also keeping an eye on pollution levels. Ostromsky is working at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to gridify a large-scale air pollution model. Called the Danish Eulerian model, it combines data on convection, diffusion, precipitation, emissions and more to predict future air pollution trends.“For a small country like Bulgaria it’s especially important to know what pollutants we’ll receive and from where,” says Ostromsky. “Emissions can travel thousands of kilometers—most of what Bulgaria get

Image of the week - Journey to the center of the Sun Simulations of the action occuring on our Sun shows downflows: plumes of cooler gas that sink away from the surface of the Sun. Image produced using VAPOR Like many 2000 yotta-ton balls of hot gas, the Sun isn’t exactly 100 percent stable. In fact, its outer third is constantly on the move, a churning jumble of convective motion, driven by huge heat production in its interior and heat loss from its outer regions. And just as hot gas rises, cool gas sinks, resulting in the formation of downflow plumes: currents of cooler gas that move towards the solar interior.  These plumes play a crucial role in the dynamics of the convective flows occurring all over the solar surface.Very high resolution computer simulations suggest that these plumes interact to form larger convective scales, and that the cool gas sinks all the way to the base of the highly stratified solar convection zone. Their coherency suggests such downflows play a key role in the transport of heat, momentum and

Image of the week - Stellar performance Giant cell convection patterns like this are giving scientists an unprecedented view of the solar interior thanks to a new model powered using Teragrid.Image courtesy of Mark Miesch, NCAR and UCARFar beneath the Sun’s surface, scientists suspect there are churning masses of plasma up to ten times larger then Earth. These masses, known as giant cells, play a critical role in solar variability, influencing magnetic storms that take aim at Earth to affect satellites as well as power and communications systems.A new model developed by a team of scientists led by Mark Miesch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is able to simulate the convection patterns of these giant cells, providing an unprecedented view of how the solar interior works.“It opens a window on a number of important solar processes, including the delicate balance of forces that causes the Sun’s equator to rotate faster than its poles,” says Miesch. “This is our first indication of what the c

  Feature - Data Processing Playground for the Climate of Tomorrow A simulation of aerial runoff during the West African summer monsoon season. The high density of blue indicates high rainfall levels.Image courtesy of Tim BrücherTim Brücher is trying to predict how raindrops will fall in a monsoon under changed climate conditions. As you can imagine, modeling future climates isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world. So guess what? Brücher’s not using his PC to do it.Brücher is part of the Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid (C3Grid), one of Germany’s first grid initiatives and a project dedicated to creating a grid-based working environment for earth system research.Brücher’s personal interest in C3Grid is driven by his own data-processing requirements: as a meteorologist, he works every day with climate models, and specifically, the IMPETUS project, an initiative aiming for more efficient management of scarce water resources in West Africa.“My pa

Feature: LEADing Weather Research This spring LEAD will launch fine-scale forecasts automatically in response to tornado-watch conditions. This experiment, the first of its kind, will cover the southern Great Plains during tornado season.  Severe storms in the United States take the lives of hundreds of people and cause more than 13 billion dollars in damage every year. Researchers who seek to improve storm forecasting, and to lessen some of the social cost inflicted annually, are hampered by the complexity of their task. The atmospheric models and data collection tools used today run essentially independent of weather conditions, they do not respond to rapid changes as they occur.“Could we do a better job forecasting and understanding the weather if we adapted to the weather as it evolves?” asks Kelvin Droegemeier, the project director of Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery, which explores that very question. Currently, weather models run in a static mode—independent of changes in temperature, wind

Feature: The Earth System Grid: Climate Data for the Global Community Results from the Parallel Climate Model depicting wind vectors, surface pressure, sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration, prepared from data published in the Earth System Grid.Image courtesy of Gary Strand, NCAR For the past two years, the Earth System Grid has helped scientists around the world study, analyze and predict all facets of the Earth’s climate. This U.S. data grid provides almost 160 terabytes of climate-related simulation data to scientists worldwide through two portals. Through the first portal, more than 3,000 scientists can find and download 130 terabytes of data hosted at four U.S. supercomputing centers: The National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The data represents six years of U.S. earth system and climate modeling simulations. “This is Comm