Abstract
Given their increasing relevance for society, I suggest that the climate science community itself does not treat the development of error-free ab initio models of the climate system with sufficient urgency. With increasing levels of difficulty, I discuss a number of proposals for speeding up such development. Firstly, I believe that climate science should make better use of the pool of post-PhD talent in mathematics and physics, for developing next-generation climate models. Secondly, I believe there is more scope for the development of modelling systems which link weather and climate prediction more seamlessly. Finally, here in Europe, I call for a new European Programme on Extreme Computing and Climate to advance our ability to simulate climate extremes, and understand the drivers of such extremes. A key goal for such a programme is the development of a 1 km global climate system model to run on the first exascale supercomputers in the early 2020s.
Highlights
The invitation to contribute to this Special Issue came with the request to write a personal perspective on: ‘How to go forward in solving a problem close to the author’s heart’
Given their increasing relevance for society, I suggest that the climate science community itself does not treat the development of error-free ab initio models of the climate system with sufficient urgency
A key goal for such a programme is the development of a 1 km global climate system model to run on the first exascale supercomputers in the early 2020s
Summary
The invitation to contribute to this Special Issue came with the request to write a personal perspective on: ‘How to go forward in solving a problem close to the author’s heart’. They do this by attempting to solve ab initio the relevant nonlinear laws of physics These models/simulators play an increasingly important role (i) in providing the science input to global policy on carbon emissions; (ii) in determining the types of infrastructure investments that will have to be made regionally to adapt to climate change; (iii) in assessing whether there is a safe ‘Plan B’ to cool the planet, based, for example, on spraying SO2 into the stratosphere (leading to a layer of sulfate aerosol there);. In the view of their relevance in solving urgent real-world problems, it is a matter of concern that climate models continue to exhibit pervasive and systematic errors when compared with observations (see §2) These errors can be as large as the signals predicted to arise from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. On these shorter timescales they are generally of secondary importance to those associated with the physical hydrological cycle
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