Predicting the onset of rain in Africa is one of a growing number of "climate services" on offer.
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From Nature magazine
An international framework for providing information about how Earth’s climate will affect everything from health to disaster planning is set to bring order to an area that has given some scientists cause for concern.
The field of ‘climate services’ has boomed in recent years, with various organizations and individuals using climate models to advise policy-makers and local people on crop production, infrastructure planning and disease management. At the first ever ‘extraordinary session’ of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland, which finished on Wednesday, members of the organization agreed on an implementation plan for a ‘Global Framework for Climate Services’ to manage how such information is gathered and communicated.
“It’s the first time the international community had come together to implement a proper formal framework for climate predictions,” says Julia Slingo, chief scientist of the UK Met Office in Exeter, who has been heavily involved in the process. “This is a real landmark in much the same way as when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established.”
The framework was initially set out in 2009, and this week's agreement is the result of a lengthy period of consultation and negotiation. More than 300 scientists were consulted, says Jerry Lengoasa, the deputy secretary-general of the WMO.
Lengoasa says the framework will focus on four priority areas: food security, disaster risk reduction, water and health. A series of objectives has been drawn up, beginning with short-term pilot projects to kick-start capabilities in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. There is also an ambitious ten-year plan to provide most of the 70 countries that the WMO has identified as having little or no capability in the area with the capacity to make their own predictions.
The framework will be "user driven", says Lengoasa, allowing those who need climate services to feed back their wants to the researchers upstream. “It will certainly be a two-way flow of information,” he says. This should assist in breaking what has sometimes been a “silo driven” approach to climate research, in which those working in physics, for example, were not linked to those in earth sciences or those in social science, he adds.
Slingo says that the scientists themselves can benefit from engaging in this way. As an example, she points to a Met Office project that worked on predicting the onset of rains in Africa. Although this is vital for local farmers, it is not something that had typically been of interest to scientists. Met Office researchers found that they could provide useful predictions, she says, and “that also challenged our science and our models”.
Climate service concerns
The global framework’s implementation comes amid increasing concern in some quarters that climate-service providers may sometimes be overselling their abilities.
“The biggest concern that I have is using climate models to project regional climate change,” says Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Climate models have demonstrated little to no skill here, and increased resolution of the global models is not helping.”
Curry says that the limitations of models are well understood in the climate-modelling community, but that the climate-services community sometimes “seems to be accepting these climate models based on faith” and has “developed a cottage industry of downscaling the climate-model simulation results to apply to regional decision-making”. The key focus, says Curry, should be on improving the data sets.
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Add Comment“The biggest concern that I have is using climate models to project regional climate change,” says Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Climate models have demonstrated little to no skill here, and increased resolution of the global models is not helping.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSums up the issue in one paragraph. Another realist sees the naked emperor dressed in ones naked finery. GK
Another denialist (G. Karst) fails to see the difference between local weather (hard to predict, especially in the long term) and global climate (easy to predict, especially if G. Karst and his pals keep using gas-guzzling SUVs).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLong term weather is "easy" to predict. Wow, you are not just drinking the kool-aid you are injecting it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe models are totally flawed precicely because nobody knows enough about the atmosphere to predict anything about it, short or long term. In fact, the very concept of a "average global temperature" is itself an arbitrary number that has no meaning at all, yet forms the basis of your ridiculous computer models, models that don't even accurately include the effects of clouds or anything involving the atmosphere above the stratosphere.
You do realize the model predicted warming of the last decade DID NOT HAPPEN causing articles like the one in SA a few months ago, about concluding with no evidence that the missing heat is in the deep ocean so the models were changed to assume this unproven theory is fact.
It has nothing to do with being a denier of climate change, it is denying your computer models have any sort of legitimacy beyond pointing out what we might to target real science at.
Your statement is 100% incorrect. WHEN local near term events can be predicted with accuracy, when the models can predict when a hurricane will form and predict its path with more accuracy than 1000 mile ranges, when you can predict when El Ninos or El Ninas can happen and what they cause, in effect when the atmoosphere and ocean are understood so well that science or models can predict any local weather event with reasonable accuracy, then your models predicting future global and large scale events will be possible.
What is unbelievable is Your concept that you can miraculousy take a load of guesses and assumptions, belief and desire and create a model out of it and then declare it is accurate for predicting global climate change a century in the future and somehow this is all 100% reliable and accurate and somehow local weather is not even a factor to consider, just incredible how indoctrinated you warmists are and the total lack of the ability to step back and apply some critical thinking skills to the claims you make.
Summary of massively long rant:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I don't want to give up my SUV to help fix the biggest threat to the planet today, so I'll make dumb comments about Kool-Aid and discredit everyone else while hoping that nobody takes a second look at my own baseless beliefs."
Do you realize that some authors (Pharyngula, for example, or Darren Naish) would delete you immediately for your pseudoscientific rant? You are behaving like Fox News does when they say "The facts aren't important, it's just the feeling that you get when you listen to the MittBot that counts".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Your statement is 100% incorrect. WHEN local near term events can be predicted with accuracy, when the models can predict when a hurricane will form and predict its path with more accuracy than 1000 mile ranges, when you can predict when El Ninos or El Ninas can happen and what they cause, in effect when the atmoosphere and ocean are understood so well that science or models can predict any local weather event with reasonable accuracy, then your models predicting future global and large scale events will be possible."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are clearly unfamiliar with the characteristics of complex dynamical systems. Nobody will EVER understand the climate of one small place because there are infinite numbers of feedbacks where conditions at any point in time and space depend heavily on the history of the system at all other points in time and space.
What you explore with these systems is the PHASE SPACE of the overall system. This is QUITE feasible, as can be demonstrated in many other similar types of models (biological systems are a good parallel for instance). The idea is to map out the basins of attractors within the phase space and determine the general trajectories of ensembles of paths through that space so you can determine what the families of outcomes look like.
Beyond that you have to appreciate that, much like for instance orbital mechanics models, there are certain overall global constraints on the entire system regardless of history. For instance a model of the solar system must conserve angular momentum. The Earth in the case of climate must obey basic conservations laws and laws related to heat flow.
It is quite feasible to create a climate simulation which has very limited regional predictive power but is quite good at predicting the GLOBAL climate because the global system must obey these constraints while individual parts do not. For instance rainfall might be spread out in many different ways, but the total scale of evapotransportation will be quite predictable even when we don't know the exact place that rain will fall.
It is understandable that from a standpoint of a person unfamiliar with dynamical systems applying a 'clockwork' type of reasoning it might seem like 'black magic' to understand a whole better than the parts but it IS quite possible. The results of climate modeling are not BS, they are just not simply intuitable without proper study.
Yes yes, the opinion of one scientist that you happen to agree with is worth that of the 1000 others that are equally qualified who disagree. I'd also like to note that Dr Curry is in no way shape or form disputing the existence or even the nature of AGW.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain, the problem here is you can argue with the specific regional predictions of the models, but you can't argue with the basic result, AGW is real. It is simply not thermodynamically tenable to argue otherwise. We know it is difficult to predict regional outcomes, so what? Your suggestion that we therefor just throw up our hands and abandon what we DO KNOW is ridiculous.
You just have no leg to stand on here. You may not understand that, but it doesn't change the facts.
Remember, though, that denialists treat facts as optional.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It is simply not thermodynamically tenable to argue otherwise."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe actual planet (you know... the other model) has solved all the thermodynamic equations, and the results were: NO global warming detected for 16 years.
I assume you understand when Judith states: "The climate sensitivity to greenhouse warming is still pretty uncertain", it is directly saying our models have not solved the thermodynamic equations to calculated sensitivity. Without a known climate sensitivity, we cannot project any thermodynamics, what-so-ever.
Alarmists need to get back to fundamental basics, and ground themselves, in the hard sciences. GK
@ GKarst,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs usual “cherry picking” and “gottcha” are the chosen method of denial. A full perusal of Judith Curry’s writings actually shows that her concern is that lack of transparency coupled with over statement of the current state of climate modeling leaves room for the denial of an apparently accelerating change in global climate.
Given that climate change and the ongoing improvement the models we can use to predict and adapt to it are two of the main directions of the university level college she heads, one would be far off base in useing her as a “gottcha” in the denial of those very things.
Are we able to predict that on July 25, 2100 there will be a class 5 hurricane striking Jacksonville Florida? Of course not, duh. Can we say that the huge estuary and barrier island complex in that given area will have been adversely effected by ongoing climate change? Not 100%, but if you live in that area you should most assuredly begin planning on it.
Is it possible that we are wrong on climate change? Yes. But what are the consequences if we’re right but allow denial for whatever reason to prevent action now? My great grand children will have to pay that bill; I choose to attempt making that bill as small as possible in every facet of my daily life, what do you do?
Are you on about this Daily Mail cherrypicking BS again???!!!! This stuff has been refuted so many times it should just be a permanent link at the top of every relevant article here by now. What you need is to stop listening to liars who tell you what they want you to hear and actually examine your sources of information critically. Until you do that you have zero credibility. The decade 2000 to 2009 is the warmest decade ever recorded, how do you explain them apples???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd NO your assumptions about thermodynamics are just wrong. This is actually not that hard. We can MEASURE the radiation hitting the Earth and that being emitted/reflected back into space. No guesses are necessary, no climate sensitivity calculation is required. The net energy gain is measurable quantity.
What Dr Curry is talking about is just how much will MORE CO2 increase the heat retained and where will that heat go within the environment (for instance how much of it will be transported into the deep ocean and how quickly). These are quite interesting and useful questions to answer, but as Curry herself states if you actually READ WHAT SHE'S WRITTEN these are "after the first decimal point" questions.
Her work in no way shape or form disproves anything about climate change. She has a particular, and minority, view about the value of simulations, but simulations are only one part of the whole story. Even if we take her viewpoint as gospel it changes very little. In fact it is just as easy to hypothesize that in this case the models are FAR TOO CONSERVATIVE, and in fact there is a rather growing body of evidence indicating this may well be true. Careful what you with for there Mr Karst, you may be in for a nasty surprise.
"""NO global warming detected for 16 years."""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a tired, old, pants-on-fire lie. You show your complete idiocy and willful ignorance by regurgitating it.
"""This stuff has been refuted so many times it should just be a permanent link at the top of every relevant article here by now. """
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat idea.
"""The decade 2000 to 2009 is the warmest decade ever recorded, how do you explain them apples???"""
He can't, so he'll either ignore it or try to discredit the facts.