Monday, March 25, 2013

Heavy weather: why we need supercomputers to teach us how clouds and climate change work

Nasa-cloud-vortices-terra_large

There's a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth's climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can't quite figure out how clouds work.


That mystery is actually the source of their greatest uncertainty when it comes to accurately predicting how much our planet's temperature will increase, scientists say. "How much the climate would warm largely depends on how clouds would change in the future," said Yen-Ting Hwang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, in an email to The Verge, noting "clouds...


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