Here is our view of the Earth from the back of our ship (latitude 81 degrees, air/water temperature 1 degree C.) How many things that affect the climate are in this picture? (Hint: the answer is more than you think.) Dr. Drew Slater of the National Snow and Ice Data Center talked to students about the big picture of modeling the Earth’s climate – and how it has evolved over time. If you start by making the simplistic statement: incoming heat (from the Sun) minus outgoing heat (reflected heat) gives you Earth’s temperature, you will get -18°C (about -0.5°F). But isn’t the case (Earth’s average temperature is about 15°C, or 59°F), so there must be other factors involved, right?
The last few decades, more and more variables have been included in the model to make it more and more accurate. For the computer programmers out there, the number of lines of code involved in the program has gone from 500 lines to 1.5million lines. For the rest of us, if we think about all the factors that affect the Earth’s climate (like in the picture below), we can start to see why you need 1.5million lines of code and a computer to figure it out. And he said one other thing I wanted to pass on – it used to be that one person knew everything about all the factors of his or her model. Now, each person knows one piece like the back of their hand, and they work with other people who know about other pieces. This means teamwork, and local and global collaboration. Here is the picture so far, but we still need even more lines of code to figure out the entire BIG picture.
