You say weather patterns change over time, but you also say we don’t have history of weather.
Which is it?
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Technically correct but I also think it was proven that mankind has changed the atmosphere and repaired it (ozone layer hole and later repair via ban of CFC’s). So nobody can state any longer that man does not have an influence on the weather. The evidence is strongly to the contrary. Even without the ozone layer fiasco of the past. You can see development influencing local weather such as cities being heat islands that retain heat vs open countryside. Corals dieing in the Ocean without replacement by anything else. If these were natural events then something would step in and replace the corals BUT that is not happening. So ancillary evidence to support the conclusion this is man induced climate change is mounting rapidly. Even the dust bowl of the Great Depression was a man induced climate change.
Also, they will have a global climate forecasting model as soon as the first Quantum Computer starts working. Can’t be done currently with existing computer technology. So that will be another benefit of Quantum Computing we should be able to run global scenarios based on man made inputs fairly rapidly and develop what if scenarios. In other words we will see this issue a lot more clearly.
A very informative post.
It’s still a few years until the hole stops getting worse and starts getting better again.
At least it’s not wildly out of control.
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I don’t think quantum computers will provide any benefit to climate modeling, which is a very different problem than the likes of cryptography which quantum computers are likely to excel at.
Human activities affect weather in a variety of different ways, which include aerosols and particulates from a variety of processes, water vapor from changes in land use (irrigation), urban heat islands and “greenhouse gases”.
I live along the CPKC Twin Cities - Chicago mainline, in Cottage Grove Minnesota. Actually the CPKC and BNSF mainlines to Chicago are right next to each other where I am, the railroads use them as a joint mainline between St. Paul and Hastings.
Anyway, an odd thing happened here. Due to all the rain, one of the lakes here in Washington County began to get too full of water. County workers opened up a flood gate that allowed some of the water to drain off into the St. Croix river (the border between MN and Wisconsin). However, the old apparatus - which apparently should have been replaced 30 years ago - got stuck open, so all the water drained from the lake.
Once they get it fixed, they say it won’t take more than a few months for it to fill back up, if we get normal rainfall. I guess until then, we’re the ‘Land of 9,999 Lakes’!
A little off topic. However, I disagree as they struggle with Supercomputers now and the crunching is slow and I might also add this was covered somewhat in the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. I believe they will also offer benefits in Medical research of diseases as well, potentially leading to disease cures. There is a good video of Quantum Computing and the promises it brings via YouTube.
Happening in several places in Wisconsin. In fact I believe I read the dam is falling apart on Merton, WI due to heavy rains and near capacity and I believe there are YouTube videos of them doing emergency shore ups to the dam. Throughout the US it is usually… “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” and dams have not been a squeaky wheel for a while. In Texas I know of an old Railroad constructed Dam in Allen, TX I believe. Which used to be submerged underwater but is now back in use. Stone construction from 1800’s and built by the Houston and Texas Central railroad to gather water for steam locomotives for a water stop. So I am sure some of the dams in the country have a railroad legacy. So this topic is more on topic then what some people might otherwise think. The whole 100 year flood standard I thought applied to railway bridges as well.
The dam that failed and caused the Johnstown Flood had a canal legacy…
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The machinery needs of dams to operate spillway are generally uses so infrequently and only in time of REAL need, thus any failures are magnified in the damage that results. The machinery normally is only operated when the reservoir created by the dam is about to exceed its full capacity and needs the spillways to bleed off excess water. In many locations the simple opening of the spillways causes damage downstream.
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In Michigan we had a dam fail because the spillway was not big enough. The spillway was OK when built 100 years ago, but was no longer deemed adaquate due to more frequent cloudbursts. The private owner was fighting the fix in court; apparently he could afford a lawyer but not the reconstruction costs.
I imagine climate models involve very large systems of differential equations that must be solved simultaneously, no? That’s a classic NP problem that quantum computers should be very useful for.
Dan
That’s right folks - it was a man-made lake. In 1961, somebody actually stood there and thought, “You know what we need more of in Minnesota?”
Dan
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Flooding on the Mississippi River is a totally different phenomenon than flooding on the Floyd River or Muddy Creek or that culvert in Doon, IA where the BNSF derailed an oil train a few years back. Which is totally different than flooding in a large closed basin like Devils Lake or Crystal Springs, ND.
Major river flooding is caused by sustained precipitation over weeks or months. In the Midwest, it’s actually caused by snowpack accumulated over months, combined with sustained heavy spring rains. Small waterway flooding is caused by short but extremely intense rainfall events. Flooding in Devils Lake is caused by sustained higher rainfall levels over decades.
I don’t know whether anyone can really say with certainty whether climate change will cause an overall increase in average annual precipitation for a given large watershed. It’s possible that warming winters will reduce snowpack to the point that flooding in the upper Mississippi will actually become less likely.
But what climate scientists have been predicting for years is that the frequency of very intense storms will increase. In the Atlantic, that would mean bigger hurricanes. In the Midwest, it would mean more storms that dump 5+ inches of rain over hundreds of square miles, washing out bridges and culverts on small-to-medium waterways. And over my territory (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and parts of Iowa and Nebraska), the observed weather in the last few years supports that prediction. I haven’t studied it enough to be able to say whether it’s statistically certain that the climate has changed, but it has been a bad decade so far for washouts.
Dan
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The catch is that the models are increasingly nondeterministic with time, so any precise deterministic framework will have only limited forward prediction capability.
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Do you mean chaotic, rather than nondeterministic? As in - slight variations in the initial conditions result in outcomes that diverge quickly?
I’m not involved in that kind of thing, but I would think that would make it even more advantageous to be able to run the simulations in a reasonable time. If every time I run it I get a different result, then I need to be able to run it many, many times to see what influences the different factors have.
Dan
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In my mind, chaotic and non-deterministic are closely related. The atmosphere has a lot of non-linear responses such as fluid flow, temperature to the 4th power for radiative heat transfer, saturation vapor pressure of water roughly doubling for every 10C and phase transitions for water. In other words, a system that is extremely sensitive to initial conditions.
I’ve seen reports of machine learning derived forecasts that are as accurate as forecasts done by numeric simulation, but taking many orders of less computer power. Some of this may apply to reducing computer power needed for climate modeling.