If the pretty still picture turns into a black box when you click on
it, you don't have a quicktime movie viewer on your computer. You can
try this other movie type,
but it is a much bigger file and will be slow
to download. You will probably have to open windows media player to view it.
The color shows ocean temperature with red being about 10 degrees
Celsius and blue about 0. The sea ice fractional coverage is shown in
white, as you might guess with bright white being fully covered.
The animation shows a random year in a long model run that is not tied
to any particular year in nature. Climate models generate "weather"
that is out of sync with nature's weather because of the famous butterfy
effect. The time a model can predict weather is only about 2
weeks. This model was run for 150 years, so we don't even bother to
try to predict real weather. Setting the greenhouse gas and aerosol
levels is the ways we can "dial-up" a particular time. This model has
year 2000 levels. The model sea ice in the northern hemisphere is
biased low and the hemisphere is also biased warm compared to the
present climate. Normally we would adjust some paremters in the cloud
scheme to tune the model a bit to reduce theses biases. This model was
run at very high resolution and tuning it would be very costly. Thus
we settled for these biases.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. OPP-0938204 (to Cecilia Bitz). Any
opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Cecilia Bitz made these animations from integrations made by the
PetaApps Modeling Team. The original members of the PetaApps team are
supported by the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructures. They have since
adopted several members, including Cecilia.
Computing was done on Kraken at the National Institute for
Computational Science through a computing grant on the TeraGrid, which
is also funded by NSF.
Cecilia Bitz
Last modified: Wed Feb 2 18:50:55 PST 2011