Predicting Climate - Part 1

What.s in store for our climate and us? It.s an extraordinarily
complex question whose answer requires physics, chemistry, earth
science, and mathematics (among other subjects) along with massive
computing power. Mathematicians use partial differential equations
to model the movement of the atmosphere; dynamical systems to
describe the feedback between land, ocean, air, and ice; and
statistics to quantify the uncertainty of current projections.
Although there is some discrepancy among different climate
forecasts, researchers all agree on the tremendous need for people
to join this effort and create new approaches to help understand
our climate. It.s impossible to predict the weather even two weeks
in advance, because almost identical sets of temperature, pressure,
etc. can in just a few days result in drastically different
weather. So how can anyone make a prediction about long-term
climate? The answer is that climate is an average of weather
conditions. In the same way that good predictions about the average
height of 100 people can be made without knowing the height of any
one person, forecasts of climate years into the future are feasible
without being able to predict the conditions on a particular day.
The challenge now is to gather more data and use subjects such as
fluid dynamics and numerical methods to extend today.s 20-year
projections forward to the next 100 years. For More Information:
Mathematics of Climate Change: A New Discipline for an Uncertain
Century, Dana Mackenzie, 2007.