National Center for Computational Sciences

To try to assess global warming’s impact on the environment and see if the world faces an abrupt climate change, Zhengyu Liu, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is turning to supercomputing technology.

Liu using a supercomputer made by Cray Inc. to run a continuous simulation of climate changes over the past 21,000 years, a span that reaches back to distant ice ages.

To prove what will happen in the future, Liu said he first must be certain of the past. That means running his computer simulations backwards in time to see if they can accurately model past climatic events. If the models do provide an accurate mirror of climate history, then they can be used to predict the impact of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases on the planet, he said.

The work isn’t just an academic exercise for Liu. “What is most urgent — what we want to know — is, ‘Can the model produce some abrupt climate change event,’” he said.

By abrupt, Liu said he means an event that could occur within someone’s lifetime, such as a vegetation collapse in part of the world similar to one that took place in Africa about 5,000 years ago, when trees there suddenly died.

“Abrupt change can happen,” he said. But current computer models don’t look at the planet’s climate as a continuous unfolding event, and that keeps researchers from connecting different points in time to understand how climatic events connect. “They cannot simulate abrupt change at all,” Liu said.

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