This Season's Oz Bushfires Were @ Scale Climate Models Didn't Project For Another 80 Years
Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers are publishing a series of articles as a kind of postmortem of the Australian bushfires. The series is both a diagnosis of what happened as flames swept across the continent, and a call to action for researchers the world over: Climate change is a crisis for people, the natural world at large—and for science itself. In particular, some of the research is making a staggering argument: This season’s bushfires were so catastrophic, they caught modelers off guard—way off guard. The models not only hadn’t predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen now, they hadn’t even predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen in the next 80 years.
“This is perhaps one of the first really big cases where we've seen the real world do something before we've been able to have the capacity to model it properly,” says climate scientist Benjamin Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, who cowrote a piece in the Nature Climate Change package. “This event was worse than anything in any of the models at any point in this century. Only one of the models toward the end of the century started producing things of this magnitude.”
“Fires are right at the end of a long sequence of models which have to be pieced together to get the right answer,” says Sanderson. While it’s easier to model some of the smaller changes that might affect an ecosystem, it’s harder to model scores of them all together and still produce an accurate result. “We have very comprehensive models of forests, and the way that the trees will respond to a warmer climate,” he adds. “And we have very comprehensive models of the climate, and models of fire tuned to individual regions. We're not at a stage where we can put them all together and have confidence in the result.”
Another problem: Running models this complex requires supercomputers. And that’s not cheap, which means scientists don’t get to keep test-running their models to fine-tune them. “It takes huge amounts of energy and computation to run a single simulation,” says Sanderson. “We backed ourselves into a corner with climate science where our models are so computationally expensive, we can't really afford to run them more than once.”
Ed. - Emphasis added, because I think I found something for Jeff Bezos to do with his $10 billion.
EDIT
https://www.wired.com/story/australias-bushfires/
= new reply since forum marked as read
