No, it won’t. As Roger Pielke Sr. has pointed out many times, climate models are not down-scalable. Not that that matters here because climate models are of no value prognostically anyway – they are process models. For predicting future climate you might as well consult chicken viscera.
An advance guard of 18-wheelers is scheduled to roll into a business park in Cheyenne, Wyo., this week to unload components of a supercomputer called Yellowstone. This 1.5-quadrillion-calculations-per-second crystal ball will model future climate and forecast extreme weather.
“It’s a big deal,” said climate scientist Linda Mearns of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Yellowstone will help researchers calculate climate change on a regional, rather than continental, scale. With a better grasp of how warming may affect local water resources, endangered species and extreme winds, local and state governments will be able to plan more effectively.
Marika Holland, chief scientist for NCAR’s Community Earth System Modeling Project, said the new supercomputer is “close to a game-changer. We’ve had incremental improvements in our computational resources over time, but . . . Yellowstone is a whole new scale, and there are things that we will be able to explore that just were not possible before.”
As climate models become more complex and detailed, limited computing power bottlenecks the research. Broad-brush models use less power, but they often cannot consider details that drive local climate, such as complex coastlines or the mountain ranges and valleys that affect rainfall. Researchers refer to this as a problem of “model resolution.”
“If you have an old digital camera that doesn’t have as many megapixels as a new one, you want to get that [new] camera because it takes sharper pictures, and you can store a lot more pictures on it,” said Richard Loft, a director in the computing lab at NCAR.
“It’s the same thing with Yellowstone. We’ve increased our ability to generate more-detailed pictures of the climate system, so we get a sharper, crisper view of things.”
Progress through faster shovelling….
Zactly. Bad software run more quickly gives bad results more quickly.
GISGO: Garbage In / Super Garbage Out. The ones with the expensive new playstation are, naturally, excited.
Why do they want to despoil the revered name of one of our most famous parks, Yellowstone, by appending it to this folly.
Also, where can I get one of those new chicken viscera computers?
There’s a protein recovery plant about 15 miles from here, compute what you like by the two-ton bin full