National Center for Computational Sciences

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using some of the fastest computers in the world to predict the climate a century from now.

The computers at ORNL are so quick that they can perform trillions of calculations a minute.

Those calculations are now being used to forecast the future.

“You never know when you’ll see something that you didn’t anticipate,” says Dr. David Erickson, Director of the Climate and Carbon Research Institute in the Center of Computational Sciences at ORNL.

We’ve all heard of wide screen tv’s but few come close to this one.

It’s 35 million pixels or in plain english the resolution of 27 HD televisions.

The main feature on Tuesday: the future.

Dr. Erickson adds, “There’s a lot of basic science questions about environmental chemistry and the physical environmental system that can’t be answered by a simple box model type thing so we are using high performance computers to simulate the earth’s climate.”

Everything on the screen comes from super computers a few floors away.

They are among the fastest in the world and are helping ORNL researchers read the world.

“We want to understand the basic biology, chemistry, and physics of earth so we can make predictions into the future. What is the distribution of precipitation, temperatures in the year 2015 or in 2030,” says Dr. Erickson.

With the click of a mouse, a model for the year 2095.

Trends of the past used to forecast the future and give us a better glimpse at the globe.

“A lot of people on the planet live in agrarian systems which means they are growing their food. If there is going to be drastic changes in the next several decades, we’d like to know.”

And the monitors will likely show.

Researchers are also working on a 1.2 million dollar project with NASA involving a satellite that will track carbon dioxide emissions around the world.

Source: WBIR
By: Brian Holt