Aug 27, 2021 07:06 PM
https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans/...te-change/
EXCERPTS: For the last 11,000 years, the southern Pacific Ocean has cycled between warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions, driving the climate on both sides of the ocean. But new modelling suggests that these cycles may be interrupted as a world warms under human-induced climate change.
An international team used one of South Korea’s fastest supercomputers to create a series of global climate model simulations. These simulations had unprecedented spatial resolution – of 10 km in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere – able to capture small-scale climatic processes like tropical cyclones and instability waves.
“Our supercomputer ran non-stop for over one year to complete a series of century-long simulations covering present-day climate and two different global warming levels,” says co-author Sun-Seon Lee from the IBS Centre for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea. “The model generated two quadrillion bytes of data; enough to fill up about 2,000 hard disks.”
The resulting study is published in Nature Climate Change. The simulations add a new piece in the long-standing puzzle of how El Niño and La Niña events (commonly known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) will be affected under climate change.
[...] the authors say that El Niño and La Niña-related rainfall extremes will continue to increase in coming years. But this model is far from the only one addressing these questions.
Earlier this month, Australian scientist Wenju Cai from the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research at CSIRO released a paper that reviewed 50 recent models. Overall, they showed that El Niño and La Niña events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change.
Cai, who was not involved in these new simulations, says that they add necessary complexity and resolution, in particular incorporating ocean meso-scale eddies.
But he cautions that “it is just one model. We need 20 or more models to see if there is an inter-modal consensus. In our series of papers, there are still 20% of models generating a reduction in ENSO.”
He also notes that this new simulation considers the situation after the climate has stabilised, while other models examine how the ENSO system changes as CO2 in the atmosphere is still increasing... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: For the last 11,000 years, the southern Pacific Ocean has cycled between warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions, driving the climate on both sides of the ocean. But new modelling suggests that these cycles may be interrupted as a world warms under human-induced climate change.
An international team used one of South Korea’s fastest supercomputers to create a series of global climate model simulations. These simulations had unprecedented spatial resolution – of 10 km in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere – able to capture small-scale climatic processes like tropical cyclones and instability waves.
“Our supercomputer ran non-stop for over one year to complete a series of century-long simulations covering present-day climate and two different global warming levels,” says co-author Sun-Seon Lee from the IBS Centre for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea. “The model generated two quadrillion bytes of data; enough to fill up about 2,000 hard disks.”
The resulting study is published in Nature Climate Change. The simulations add a new piece in the long-standing puzzle of how El Niño and La Niña events (commonly known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) will be affected under climate change.
[...] the authors say that El Niño and La Niña-related rainfall extremes will continue to increase in coming years. But this model is far from the only one addressing these questions.
Earlier this month, Australian scientist Wenju Cai from the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research at CSIRO released a paper that reviewed 50 recent models. Overall, they showed that El Niño and La Niña events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change.
Cai, who was not involved in these new simulations, says that they add necessary complexity and resolution, in particular incorporating ocean meso-scale eddies.
But he cautions that “it is just one model. We need 20 or more models to see if there is an inter-modal consensus. In our series of papers, there are still 20% of models generating a reduction in ENSO.”
He also notes that this new simulation considers the situation after the climate has stabilised, while other models examine how the ENSO system changes as CO2 in the atmosphere is still increasing... (MORE - missing details)