{"id":4276,"date":"2021-10-05T11:30:41","date_gmt":"2021-10-05T15:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=4276"},"modified":"2021-10-05T12:11:39","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T16:11:39","slug":"nobel-prize-for-climate-modeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2021\/10\/nobel-prize-for-climate-modeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize for Climate Modeling"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honour of today’s announcement that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi have been awarded the Nobel prize in physics<\/a> for their contributions to understanding and modeling complex systems, I’m posting here some extracts from my forthcoming book, “Computing the Climate”, describing Manabe’s early work on modeling the climate system.\u00a0We’ll start the story with the breakthrough by Norman Phillips at Princeton University\u2019s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which I wrote about in my last post<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Birth of General Circulation Modeling<\/h3>\n

Phillips had built what we now acknowledge as the first general circulation model (GCM), in 1955. It was ridiculously simple, representing the earth as a cylinder rather than a globe, with the state of the atmosphere expressed using a single variable\u2014air pressure\u2014at two different heights, at each of 272 points around the planet (a grid of 16 x 17 points). Despite its simplicity, Phillips\u2019 model did something remarkable. When started with a uniform atmosphere\u2014the same values at every grid point\u2014the model gradually developed its own stable jet stream, under the influence of the equations that describe the effect of heat from the sun and rotation of the earth. The model was hailed as a remarkable success, and inspired a generation of atmospheric scientists to develop their own global circulation models.<\/p>\n

The idea of starting the model with the atmosphere at rest\u2014and seeing what patterns emerge\u2014is a key feature that makes this style of modelling radically different how models are used in weather forecasting. Numerical weather forecasting had taken off rapidly, and by 1960, three countries\u2014the United States, Sweden and Japan\u2014had operational numerical weather forecasting services up and running. So there was plenty of expertise already in numerical methods and computational modelling among the meteorological community, especially in those three countries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But whereas a weather model only simulates a few days starting from data about current conditions, a general circulation model has to simulate long-term stable patterns, which means many of the simplifications to the equations of motion that worked in early weather forecasting models don\u2019t work in GCMs. The weather models of the 1950s all ignore fast moving waves that are irrelevant in short-term weather forecasts. But these simplifications make the model unstable over longer runs. The atmosphere would steadily lose energy\u2014and sometimes air and moisture too\u2014so that realistic climatic patterns don\u2019t emerge. The small group of scientists interested in general circulation modelling began to diverge from the larger numerical weather forecasting community, choosing to focus on versions of the equations and numerical algorithms with conservation of mass and energy built in, to give stable long-range simulations.<\/p>\n

In 1955, the US Weather Bureau established a General Circulation Research Laboratory, specifically to build on Phillips\u2019 success. It was headed by Joseph Smagorinsky, one of the original members of the ENIAC weather modelling team<\/a>. Originally located just outside Washington DC, the lab has undergone several name changes and relocations, and is now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (GFDL), housed at Princeton University, where it remains a major climate modelling lab today.<\/p>\n

In 1959, Smagorinsky recruited the young Japanese meteorologist, Syukuro Manabe from Tokyo, and they began work on a primitive equation<\/a> model. Like Phillips, they began with a model that represented only one hemisphere. Manabe concentrated on the mathematical structure of the models, while Smagorinsky hired a large team of programmers to develop the code. By 1963, they had developed a nine-layer atmosphere model which exchanged water\u2014but not heat\u2014between the atmosphere and surface. The planet\u2019s surface, however, was flat and featureless\u2014a continuous swamp from which water could evaporate, but which had no internal dynamics of its own. The model could simulate radiation passing through the atmosphere, interacting with water vapour, ozone and CO2. Like most of the early GCMs, this model captured realistic global patterns, but had many of the details wrong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Yale Mintz, the associate director of the Department of Meteorology, recruited another young Japanese meteorologist, Akio Arakawa, to help him build their own general circulation model. From 1961, Mintz and Arakawa developed a series of models, with Mintz providing the theoretical direction, and Arakawa designing the model, with help from the department\u2019s graduate students. By 1964, their model represented the entire globe with a 2-layer atmosphere and realistic geography.<\/p>\n

Computational limitations dominated the choices these two teams had to make. For example, the GFDL team modelled only the northern hemisphere, with a featureless surface, so that they could put more layers into the atmosphere, while the UCLA team chose the opposite route: an entire global model with realistic layout of continents and oceans, but with only 2 layers of atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Early Warming Signals<\/h3>\n

Meanwhile, in the early 1950s, oceanographers at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography in California, under the leadership of their new director, Roger Revelle, were investigating the spread of radioactive fallout in the oceans from nuclear weapons testing. Their work was funded by the US military, who needed to know how quickly the oceans would absorb these contaminants, to assess the risks to human health. But Revelle had many other research interests. He had read about the idea that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels could warm the planet, and realized radiocarbon dating could be used to measure how quickly the ocean absorbs CO2. Revelle understood the importance of a community effort, so he persuaded a number of colleagues to do similar analysis, and in a coordinated set of three papers [Craig, 1957; Revelle & S\u00fcess, 1957; and Arnold & Anderson, 1957], published in 1957, the group presented their results.<\/p>\n

They all found a consistent pattern: the surface layer of the ocean continuously absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, so on average, a molecule of CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere only for about 7 years, before being dissolved into the ocean. But the surface waters also release CO2, especially when they warm up in the sun. So the atmosphere and surface waters exchange CO2 molecules continuously\u2014any extra CO2 will end up shared between them<\/p>\n

All three papers also confirmed that the surface waters don\u2019t mix much with the deeper ocean. So it takes hundreds of years for any extra carbon to pass down into deeper waters. The implications were clear\u2014the oceans weren\u2019t absorbing CO2 anywhere near as fast as we were producing it.<\/p>\n

These findings set alarm bells ringing amongst the geosciences community. If this was correct, the effects of climate change would be noticeable within a few decades. But without data, it would be hard to test their prediction. At Scripps, Revelle hired a young chemist, David Charles Keeling, to begin detailed measurements. In 1958, Keeling set up an observing station on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and a second station in the Antarctic, both far enough from any major sources of emissions to give a reliable baseline measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. Funding for the Antarctic station was cut a few years later, but Keeling managed to keep the recordings going at Mauna Loa, where they are still collected regularly today. Within two years, Keeling had enough data to confirm Bolin and Ericsson\u2019s analysis: CO2 levels in the atmosphere were rising sharply<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Keeling\u2019s data helped to spread awareness of the issue rapidly among the ocean and atmospheric science research communities, even as scientists in other fields remained unaware of the issue. Alarm at the implications of the speed at which CO2 levels were rising led some scientists to alert the country\u2019s political leaders. When President Lyndon Johnson commissioned a report on the state of the environment, in 1964, the president\u2019s science advisory committee invited a small subcommittee\u2014including Revelle, Keeling, and Smagorinsky\u2014to write an appendix to the report, focusing on the threat of climate change. And so, on February 8th, 1965, President Johnson became the first major world leader to mention the threat of climate change, in speech to congress: \u201cThis generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through\u2026a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Climate Modeling Takes Off<\/h3>\n

So awareness of the CO2 problem was spreading rapidly through the scientific community just as the general circulation modelling community was getting established. However, it wasn\u2019t clear that global circulation models would be suited to this task. Computational power was limited, and it wasn\u2019t yet possible to run the models long enough to simulate the decades or centuries over which climate change would occur. Besides, the first generation of GCMs had so many simplifications, it seemed unlikely they could simulate the effects of increasing CO2\u2014that wasn\u2019t what they were designed for.<\/p>\n

To do this properly, the models would need to include all the relevant energy exchanges between the surface, atmosphere and space. That would mean a model that accurately captured the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere, along with the process of radiation, convection, evaporation and precipitation, all of which move energy vertically. None of these processes are adequately captured in the primitive equations, so they would all need to be added as parameterization schemes in the models.<\/p>\n

Smagorinsky and Manabe at GFDL were the only group anywhere near ready to try running CO2 experiments in their global circulation model. Their nine-layer model already captured some of the vertical structure of the atmosphere, and Suki Manabe had built in a detailed radiation code from the start, with the help of a visiting German meteorologist, Fritz M\u00f6ller.\u00a0Manabe had a model of the\u00a0relevant heat exchanges in the full height of the atmosphere working by 1967, and together with his colleague, Richard Wetherald, published what is now recognized as the first accurate computational experiment of climate change [Manabe and Wetherald, 1967].<\/p>\n

Running the general circulation model for this experiment was still too computationally expensive, so they ignored all horizontal heat exchanges, and instead built a one dimensional model of just a single column of atmosphere. The model could be run with 9 or 18 layers, and included the effects of upwards and downwards radiation through the column, exchanges of heat through convection, and the latent heat of evaporation and condensation of water. Manabe and Wetherald first tested the model with current atmospheric conditions, to check it could reproduce the correct vertical distribution of temperatures in the atmosphere, which it did very well. They then doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the model and ran it again. They found temperatures rose throughout the lower atmosphere, with a rise of about 2\u00b0C at the surface, while the stratosphere showed a corresponding cooling. This pattern\u2014warming in the lower atmosphere and cooling in the stratosphere\u2014shows up in all the modern global climate models, but wasn\u2019t confirmed by satellite readings until the 2000s.<\/p>\n

By the mid 1970s, a broad community of scientists were replicating Manabe and Wetherald\u2019s experiment in a variety of simplified models, although it would take nearly a decade before anyone could run the experiment in a full 3-dimensional GCM. But the community was beginning to use the term climate modelling<\/i> to describe their work\u2014a term given much greater impetus when it was used as the title of a comprehensive survey of the field by two NCAR scientists, Steven Schneider and Robert Dickinson in 1975. Remarkably, their paper [Schneider and Dickinson, 1974] charts a massive growth of research, citing the work of over 150 authors who published work on climate modelling the in period from 1967-1975, after Manabe and Wetherald\u2019s original experiment.<\/p>\n

It took some time, however, to get the general circulation models to the point where they could also run a global<\/em> climate change experiment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Manabe and Wetherald were also the first to do this, in 1975. Their GCM produced a higher result for the doubled CO2 experiment\u2014an average surface warming of 3\u00b0C\u2014and they attributed this to the snow-albedo feedback, which is included in the GCM, but not in their original single column model. Their experiment [Manabe and Wetherald 1975] also showed an important effect first noted by Arrhenius: a much greater warming at the poles than towards the equator\u2014because polar temperatures are much more sensitive to changes in the rate at which heat escapes to space. And their model predicted another effect\u2014global warming would speed up evaporation and precipitation, and hence produce more intense rainfalls. This prediction has already been demonstrated in the rapid uptick of extreme weather events in the 2010s.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, Manabe’s simplified models produced remarkably accurate predictions of future climate change. Manabe used his early experiments to predict a temperature rise of about 0.8\u00b0C by the year 2000, assuming a 25% increase in CO2 over the course of the twentieth century. Manabe\u2019s assumption about the rate that CO2 would increase was almost spot on, and so was his calculation for the resulting temperature rise. CO2 levels rose from about 300ppm in 1900 to 370ppm in 2000, a rise of 23%. The change in temperature over this period, calculated as the change in decadal means in the HadCRUT5 dataset was 0.82\u00b0C. [Hausfather et al 2020].<\/p>\n

References<\/h3>\n

Arnold, J. R., & Anderson, E. C. (1957). The Distribution of Carbon-14 in Nature<\/a>. Tellus<\/i>, 9<\/i>(1), 28\u201332.<\/p>\n

Craig, H. (1957). The Natural Distribution of Radiocarbon and the Exchange Time of Carbon Dioxide Between Atmosphere and Sea<\/a>. Tellus<\/i>, 9<\/i>(1), 1\u201317.<\/p>\n

Hausfather, Z., Drake, H. F., Abbott, T., & Schmidt, G. A. (2020). Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections<\/a>. Geophysical Research Letters<\/i>, 47<\/i>(1), 2019GL085378.<\/p>\n

Manabe, S., & Wetherald, R. T. (1967). Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity<\/a>. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Manabe, S., & Wetherald, R. T. (1975). The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the Climate of a General Circulation Model<\/a>. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences<\/i>, 32<\/i>(1), 3\u201315.<\/p>\n

Revelle, R., & Suess, H. E. (1957). Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO 2 during the Past Decades<\/a>. Tellus<\/i>, 9<\/i>(1), 18\u201327.<\/p>\n

Schneider, S. H., & Dickinson, R. E. (1974). Climate modeling<\/a>. Reviews of Geophysics<\/i>, 12<\/i>(3), 447.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honour of today’s announcement that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi have been awarded the Nobel prize in physics for their contributions to understanding and modeling complex systems, I’m posting here some extracts from my forthcoming book, “Computing the Climate”, describing Manabe’s early work on modeling the climate system.\u00a0We’ll start the story with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4276"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4283,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions\/4283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}