Within the last year, England has experienced some of the worst flooding to date. While researchers at Oxford University attempt to model the climate change during the 2013-2014 winter season, help may be also found at the local level through England’s home computers. Professor Myles Allen, head researcher for weather@home, claims “basic physics shows that warm air holds more water and rainfall gets more intense, but added that the chaotic nature of weather means that no specific flood can be attributed to human-induced climate change alone.” Essentially, Allen and his team looks to determine what causes the floods in England. Whether it be natural causes or human-induced factors, local computing power will come into play to help find the answer. One set of computer models will start at the beginning of December 2013 and rerun over 30,000 times while another computer model set will run according to a world “without climate change.” Deciphering the models will act as substantial data behind debates concerning the influence of climate change on extreme weather. People around England will soon have the ability to chime in and fire up their computers against climate change. Additionally, these local people can actively see increases and decreases on their monitors pertaining to the relationship between flooding and climate change in England over the past year.
I’ve heard of a lot of people have already have houses or want to develop in the outer banks being worried about flooding due to hurricanes so hopefully this model can be used in places in the US too!
I’m really anxious to see what results they get from this climate model! In our second lab report, I think we all saw that it’s really hard to attribute increased rainfall to climate change, so it will be interesting to see how they overcome these challenges!