February 10, 2004

Predicting the Weather in the Next Century

A new supercomputer at UC Irvine will allow researchers to forecast the Earth's climate hundreds of years into the future.

By Marisa O'Neil

While most people watch the evening news to see if they'll need their umbrella the next day, researchers on campus are predicting the weather 300 years from now.

A new $1-million supercomputer in UC Irvine's department of earth system science creates models to simulate global climate conditions hundreds of years from now. Unlike the local weather forecast, it gives a worldwide, long-term overview.

"We're not doing the five-day forecast," said Charlie Zender, assistant professor of earth system science. "We're doing the five-month forecast, the five-year forecast, the 50-year forecast."

UCI earth system science researchers will use the Earth System Modeling Facility, which Zender likes to call the "virtual climate time machine," to predict overall trends and potential effects of global warming. It will provide them a general picture, not all the specifics.

"Our climate forecast tells you what the average daytime temperature or average minimum overnight temperature might be," Zender said. "It's not going to tell you if it's going to rain on your birthday 10 years from now."

By using past climactic information, current conditions and projected greenhouse gas emissions, they can predict things such as the frequency of El Nino events. They are also looking for signs of rapid climate shifts — global warming or ice ages — which have historically taken

place in as little as 10 years, Zender said.

The department purchased the IBM supercomputer with money from a National Science Foundation grant.

Once the domain of government agencies, supercomputing is starting to hit the relative mainstream, said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. UCI's new computer consists of seven servers linked together that work as a single system, rather than the behemoth room-sized supercomputers of days past.

"Supercomputers are pretty ubiquitous and far reaching," Turek said. "They're no longer restricted to the purview of the scientists you might remember from the science-fiction movies of the 1960s and '70s."

The UCI computer is 528 gigaflops, meaning it can run 528 billion calculations in one second. Turek ranked it as one of the top 400 supercomputers in the world.

Its use will be devoted to climate research, Zender said, and eight groups will test their hypotheses on it and write papers based on its findings. He expects calculations for each project to take about a week.

"On a per-professor basis, this computer gives UCI more power than probably any other facility in the country to attack this problem," he said. "All the [research] groups include graduate students, so they can learn the nuts and bolts of climate research from the beginning to the end."