Summer days and nights of 2009

This video was recently featured on the HPC Wire YouTube channel. It is an animation of the summer weather of 2009, as only super computers can do! HPC refers to "High Performance Computing". Cray was one of several contributors to the project. I still think of Cray as THE super computer developer, though those days are probably past.

What's so special here?

A recent HPC Wire article about climate change explained why simulation at such a fine resolution (7-kilometer) was so difficult, because it required:

a special allocation of computing time on the Athena supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS)... For six months, the entire 18,048-core system was at the disposal of the team. Among the results ... were simulations that represented boreal summer climatology at 7-kilometer resolution

Notice shifting cloud cover and precipitation in shades of gray scale during the summer months of 2009. The quality is exceptional.


I appreciated that the production group chose NOT to use any music, nor narrative, during this 1 minute, 38 second animation. I wish that were more common, especially for brief, well-annotated videos like this!

Climate change perception v. evidence-based reality

I read a rather comprehensive technical paper that should be enough to convince anyone that something has changed, for the worst, in the Earth's climate: Distributions and Trends of Death and Destruction from Hurricanes, 1900–2008, Willoughby, H. (Jan 2012); Nat. Hazards Rev., 13(1), 57–64. This led to some thoughts that I wrote up, regarding climate change and New York City's physical infrastructure, in light of the recent storm, Sandy.

Finally, I find it difficult to ignore the odd perception gap between climate change denialists and the growing body of climate change evidence. I found an analysis of that discrepancy and its possible cause from an unexpected source: An article in Nature, "Why we are poles apart on climate change" by a Professor of Law, at Yale University School of Law. He wrote something a few months prior to this, a bona fide scholarly journal article, which had some distressing conclusions which I think are correct, though I don't exactly understand the cause, see The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks Kahan et. al. (Apr 2012); Nature Climate Change 2, 732–735:

Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

HTML5 video

If possible, try to view this in full screen mode for optimal effect. The video supports up to 720p.

I suggest trying the YouTube HTML5 player. It is in beta, but works well, and has been available for nearly a year. Most videos seem better when viewed with HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash, whether YouTube or Vimeo. There is less of the dreaded "Flash Crash", although they can get laggy. I always enjoy the comparison!