2hundred20

Hi Leigh,

Every year, a convention of medieval historians descends upon Kalamazoo, MI and during that time, attends the MT location there. Are you aware of any comments they've made about accuracy and have you or your crew ever worked with them to incorporate their input?

"Best" is tricky. Some models excel in certain areas and are outperformed in others. The best approach is to look at many models and average their results.

Climate models tasked with projecting future climate often have certain forcings applied to them. To test different climate change scenarios, many climatologists refer to the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) system. This is made up of four scenarios: RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6 and RCP8.5. The number refers to the amount difference, in watts per square meter, in thermal energy caused by increased greenhouse gasses by the end of the 21st century. 2.6 is a 'best case scenario' where humans essentially did everything they could to reverse the course of climate change when the RCP system was conceived and is widely considered to no longer be possible. 8.5 is the 'business as usual' scenario where humans make no changes to behavior and continue to develop and utilize fossil fuel resources as before. The RCP scenarios are simply values for increased thermal energy that you plug into the model in each given year between 2005 and 2100 to simulate the effects of greenhouse gas warming.

You're referring to midlatitude systems. Cyclones that we experience in the American Midwest or in Europe are driven by the temperature differential you speak of and there is a bit of uncertainty as to how they will be affected by the unequal heating of the poles vs. the equator. Hurricane are a very different type of system which are not really influenced by the same principle but instead driven primarily by sea surface temperature and atmospheric humidity.