Ocean Salinity and Climate Change Models

Submitted by Jay Reynolds


The abstract below is from Earth Interactions, published by the American Geophysical Union, the main publication of scientific research in geophysics. It describes one way that the computer program by which scientists attempt to simulate climate is seriously flawed.

The Global Circulation Model(GCM) is known to be deficient in factors which influence climate due to a lack of computational power (even though large computers are used) and the present lack of knowledge about many basic factors that influence climate such as clouds, water vapor, and rainfall. The chaotic and still largely unknown interactions within the climate system may never be accurately represented by mathematical means.

The GCM is being used to "forecast" what our climate will be like on along term basis, including the 50- and 100-year forecasts used to support the global warming hypothesis. When the GCM was in its early stages of development, it used the best technology available, and the best knowledge of the climate system. Due to the constraints at the time, the early GCM represented climate without interaction with oceans, and did not take into account particulates in the air which can come from volcanos and dust storms.

Present GCMs use many more variables, but still do not accurately simulate climate.An example would be that today's GCM represents clouds as three-dimensional planar blocks which are the same density from top to bottom, while even a child can see that clouds are seldom either flat on top or bottom, or the same density clear through.

The abstract below describes the fact that today's GCM also neglects to factor in salt water in the oceans. This GCM predicts the rising temperatures over the next 100 years that threaten to barbecue the earth, the rising oceans, the intense rainfall, extreme drought, epidemic diseases, and the imminent doom of the entire planet.

Would you trust your future to someone who doesn't know the sea is salt?

Simulation Errors Associated with the Neglect of Oceanic Salinity in an Atmospheric GCM

AU: Sud, Y. C.; Walker, G. K. CK: Sud and Walker:1997 TI: Simulation Errors Associated with the Neglect of Oceanic Salinity in an Atmospheric GCM PY: 1997 KW: Modeling, General circulation, Air-sea interaction, Convective processes PN: EI004 AB:

In all the atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs) at the Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres (GLA), the influence of oceanic salinity on the saturation vapor pressure of seawater is ignored. Since the relative humidity in the oceanic boundary layer is generally high while the saturation vapor pressure of seawater is lowered by salinity, its neglect could have a nontrivial influence on the near-surface specific humidity gradient, a primary determinant of oceanic evaporation. Such an approximation might effect the simulated circulation and rainfall systematically. To evaluate this idea, we carried out a 5-yr-long salinity simulation (S) with the GLA GCM in which the influence of salinity on the saturation vapor pressure of seawater was included. Corresponding to this, a control simulation (C) with the GLA GCM in which the salinity effect was ignored was also available. Analyses of S-minus-C fields have shown some evidence of discernible systematic errors in the global evaporation, boundary layer specific humidity, and several key parameters that affect the onset of moist convection, for example, convective available potential energy. Several other systematic effects are also evident even though they remain small compared to the interannual variability of climate. The systematic interactions caused by the neglect of salinity are evidently spurious, and even though the final outcome is less dramatic than anticipated originally, several persistent systematic errors can be noted in the 5-yr mean fields. Based on these results, we infer that coupled ocean-atmosphere models that ignore the influence of salinity on ocean evaporation might also benefit from the salinity correction. Indeed, the correction is so trivial to include, its neglect in the modern state-of-the-art GCMs is unwarranted.


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