Scientists have issued one of their starkest warnings yet over climate change, suggesting that clouds could be wiped away from our skies, potentially forever.
Using global models based on computer algorithms, the researchers appeared to be concluding that the earth may shortly become bereft of clouds, although they also appeared to suggest that they could also go the other way and become thicker and more reflective. Pinpointing which is the likelier scenario has been difficult to predict, until now.
Using models to make forecasts have been difficult to produce in the past, but this latest research utilising the Frontera super-computer is establishing a way of coming up with far more accurate indications.
Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine, told The Express : "Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets – or they could thicken and become more reflective. If you ask two different climate models what the future will be like when we add a lot more CO2, you get two very different answers – and the key reason for this is the way clouds are included in climate models."
He said the world's most advanced global climate models struggled to approach what he termed "four-kilometre global resolution" so far. To get more accurate forecasts, a resolution of at least 100 metres is needed to capture the fine-scale turbulent eddies that form shallow cloud systems.
While this could take decades, Prof Pritchard's team is developing a model broken into two parts – a coarse, low-resolution model and another consisting of many small patches with 100 to 200-metre resolutions. Run together, they exchange data every half hour. This can then capture the processes of cloud formation without producing unwanted side-effects.
Prof Pritchard told The Express: "The model does an end-run around the hardest problem – whole planet modelling. It has thousands of little micromodels that capture things like realistic shallow cloud formation that only emerge in very high resolution."
The results were reported in the Journal of Advances in Modelling Earth Systems.
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