Gavin Schmidt , one of the promoters of realclimate, is a climate modeler in his spare time, involved with GISS Model E. Dan Hughes, who sometimes posts here, has a new blog at which he’s posted up some comments on GISS code A GISS Model E code fragment. The code has the following interesting comment:
C**** This fix adjusts thermal energy to conserve total energy TE=KE+PE
Dan then proceeds to locate a variable ediff that seems to be a fudge factor. Now we’ve been told that the modern models no longer use flux adjustment, but, in Dan’s opinion, ediff appears like an unsavory type of adjustment. I hope that Dan continues parsing through GCM code. It looks like a fair amount of GCM code may now be available online and this might be something for computer-oriented people to parse through. I don’t plan to do this myself, but will be happy to host any comments and I plan to keep an eye on what Dan observes.
While I’m doing a shout out to new blogs, Margo has continued to post interesting posts at her blog.
Here’s are interesting minutes of the IPCC WG1 leading up to the approval of the SPM.
Jerry Browning writes the following about the balance between vertical velocity and total heating:
Browning and Kreiss (2002) have shown that as one moves from the large-scale features in the midlatitudes to the smaller scale features, a balance between the vertical velocity and the total heating must be maintained for the solution to evolve slowly in time.
The horizontal divergence of the balanced solution becomes important and the traditional balance equation of quasi-geostrophic dynamics must be extended. Recently this balance has been shown to provide a slowly evolving solution in time in a forecast model with physical parameterizations (Page et al. 2007).
The same balance between the vertical velocity and total heating applies near the equator for all scales of motion. Thus one might expect that if the solar variability has the most impact near the equator, e.g. in evaporation at the ocean surface, the variability is most likely to be seen in the vertical velocity near the equator.
References:
Browning, G. L. and H.-O. Kreiss: Multiscale bounded derivative initialization for an arbitrary domain, JAS, 59 ,1680 -1696
Page, C., L. Fillion and P. Zwack: Diagnosing summertime mesoscale vertical motion: implications for atmospheric data assimilation, MWR (Accepted, see PTA)
One of the two Coordinating Lead Authors of the IPCC Paleoclimate chapter (chapter 6), Eystein Jansen – the other is Jonathan Overpeck of “Get rid of the MWP” fame – was asked about the Mann Hockey Stick and M&M criticism by a Norwegian newspaper yesterday. I guess not every one is prepared to forget IPCC TAR and to “move on” quite so rapidly as the nomadic Hockey Team, who barely can rest their heads in the same place two nights in a row. The blog report here.
The UN climate researchers are totally uninterested in discussing the merits of Mann et al’s PhotoShopping of history these days, despite the “hockey stick” being the star witness for global warming a few years back. Eystein Jansen, a Norwegian climate scientist who is a leading author of the IPCC report, says evasively that the (full) IPCC report “has not done any specific evaluation of the arguments” of McIntyre and McKitrick. It is, he argues, pretty uninteresting at this point.
The newspaper article is here and if anyone can volunteer a translation of the last few paragraphs, I’d be interested.
John Bell has posted some comments on a thread here about a recent poster and GRL article by Holgate on sea level rise. Here’s something that caught my eye. Continue reading →
Gerry Browning sent in the following post:
If a time dependent equation has a solution that grows exponentially in time, then that solution is very sensitive to errors in the initial condition, i.e., any error in the initial condition will cause an exponential deviation in time from the true solution. Continue reading →
I’m feeling a little less grumpy about blog crashes which were wearing me out. I’ll obviously be commenting on AR4 but I’m not sure where I want to start. While I was researching some material, I came across an interesting comment in James Elsner’s occasional blog (only a few posts per year) about adjustments to hurricane wind speeds – a hot topic in the hurricane wars – which ties back to a thread from Willis in October about Elsner et al 2006. Continue reading →
Sorry about the outage but the VPS just became so unstable that it was unusable, and Steve was spending too much time fretting over the server rather than doing his analysis of climate science.
There are various things in the background which need to be setup, but hopefully all commenters can carry on commenting.
By the way, since this is the same server that runs auditblogs.com then some of you will be pleased to know that LaTeX is back:
Let me know if anything else is amiss.
The SPM contains an embarrassing typographical error in connection with an issue identified as a hot-button issue: the contribution of Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise. It also failed to report WG1 model results on Antarctic contributions to lowering sea levels in the 21st century. Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
IPCC Paleoclimate Lead Author on M&M
One of the two Coordinating Lead Authors of the IPCC Paleoclimate chapter (chapter 6), Eystein Jansen – the other is Jonathan Overpeck of “Get rid of the MWP” fame – was asked about the Mann Hockey Stick and M&M criticism by a Norwegian newspaper yesterday. I guess not every one is prepared to forget IPCC TAR and to “move on” quite so rapidly as the nomadic Hockey Team, who barely can rest their heads in the same place two nights in a row. The blog report here.
The newspaper article is here and if anyone can volunteer a translation of the last few paragraphs, I’d be interested.