The Unknown And The Unexpected: Climate Change And The Pacific Northwest

1. The Unknown And The Unexpected:Climate Change And The Pacific Northwest Mark R. Abbott College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences Oregon State University

2. Overview • Global scale climate • Modeling and climate • Climate and the Northwest • New ways to approach the unknowable

3. Historical Records of CO2

4. CO2 And Temperature

5. Past And Future Rise In Sea Level 20,000 years ago 2200? ( + 5 meters)

6. Timeline Of Climate Model Development Figure courtesy W. Washington, NCAR

7. Impacts Of Spatial Resolution On The Types Of Terrain That Are Included In Models Figure courtesy S. Hostetler, USGS/OSU

8. What Was Predicted For Last Winter?

9. What Actually Happened?

10. An Impact Of Climate Change?

11. Climate Change Impacts Depend On Variability • Variability may have more human impact than mean state • Examples • European heat wave • Niger drought Figure courtesy A. Mix, OSU

12. The Five “Currencies” Of The Earth System • Energy • Water • Carbon • Money • Information • Next-generation Earth system models must account for all of these currencies

13. Innovation In Earth System Models The “Old” Way • Increased temporal and spatial resolution • Data assimilation and near real-time observatories and sensor networks • Increasing coupling of components and increasing richness of models • Impact on HPC requirements has been a focus on increased capacities for computation as well as on post-production analyses • Can the community obtain the HPC resources it needs in a rapidly-changing market?

14. New Demands On Climate Models • Not just increased resolution and more physics • Risk assessments and scenarios • Impacts of climate change on human migration patterns • Rare but high impact scenarios • Feedbacks between climate and socioeconomic processes • Past as a poor predictor of the future • Need to create diverse and resilient knowledge networks to develop and test scenarios • Adaptive management rather than rigid protocols

15. CPU CPU MPI System Architectures • The Intel and AMD Approach • General purpose systems for a wide array of applications • 6 month technology cycle • Science community started rolling their own clusters because of lower costs

16. Core 1 Core 2 Core 3 Core 4 Core 1 Core 2 Core 3 Core 4 OpenMP OpenMP MPI Increasingly Complex Architectures • Intel and AMD stalled at 3 GHz because of packaging issues (i.e., heat dissipation) • Now going multi-core at lower frequency • Increasingly complex programming model • Low efficiencies because fundamental models require lots of shared memory (and hence message passing) • Focus on communications infrastructure • Hard to take generalized commodity systems and support innovation • New architectures (CPU/GPU) now entering the fray

17. Is This Innovation? • Community models • Good for production runs and post-production analyses • Good for education • Not so good for adding new components and new physics and biogeochemistry • Supercomputer centers • Good for production runs of very large models • Not especially efficient for exploration of new models and new approaches • New architectures make it increasingly difficult to code • We need more than a big data center with VT 100 terminals

18. Shifting The Context For IT • Transforming our workflows • Real-time, continuous, adaptive • Shifting the balance of data and knowledge • Collaborative, networked, interdisciplinary • Not just bigger and faster • A collection of adaptable, dynamic services • Increased customization in a commodity world • HPC-enabled components live everywhere, not just data centers • End-to-end, user experience is critical • Not just in the office or lab

19. A New Approach? • Overcoming language and cultural barriers to enable collaboration • Merging data streams and sensors • Developing and testing models • Seeking out underlying and emergent rules to make projections and predictions • This looks more like a network gaming metaphor • New capabilities include • Preservation, provenance, collaboration, accountability, and reputation

20. Shifting The Community • From data delivery to knowledge services • The Wikipedia model for smart mobs • Networks of potential resources • Innovation will come from the fringes • More “democracy” in the system • What used to be expensive and complex is now available to everyone • Need for standard, open frameworks • Simple and extensible • Not driven solely by science requirements • But still require enormous amount of work

21. Convergences • New IT capabilities will bring more integration among diverse communities, data sets, and models • New demands for climate models and climate services will require these capabilities • Need a resilient approach to the complexities and uncertainties of the future

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23. Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2007