Portal de Murcia
www.portaldemurcia.com
Juan José Gómez Navarro, member of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling (MAR) group, leads the Paleolink international project.
The objective is to better understand the evolution of climate in the past in order to characterize the extent to which climate change is attributable to human activity and to better predict its future.
Without measurements from other times like these, these inquiries use immutable physical laws to perform reconstructions and modeling.
The latter are carried out with computer programs that implement equations of atmospheric chemistry and dynamics.
In the words of the researcher: "If the climate model simulates the present, I can believe that it will also be able to reproduce the past, as well as the future."
The project arises with the aim of solving two essential problems: the difficulty of comparing to what extent the models resemble the reconstructions;
and the need to centralize information and generate collaborations to obtain more remarkable results.
To solve them, the scientist came in contact with 'Pages', an international consortium to promote studies on the climatic variability of the past.
The proposal is to create a network of collaborations to improve high resolution models and deepen their evolution.
"It is not only about publishing, but about having visibility and leadership: placing the papers in the center of Europe", specifies the physicist.
This initiative aims to put an end to the so-called 'scale gap', the knowledge hole between the information provided by simulations and climate reconstructions.
That is, to exercise the link between the two.
In global simulations that cover the entire earth, the computational cost is very large, which becomes low spatial resolution.
For example, when the climate is simulated in an area similar to the Pyrenees and compared with the observations, both data do not coincide.
This is because a global model is not capable of reproducing local details.
In order to solve it, the scientist explains that "a regional model is placed in the middle, which in the main is designed as a global one, but it is applied to a smaller limited area, such as the Iberian Peninsula".
Gómez Navarro illustrates that this technical problem is reflected in the real world of the scientific community.
"I seek to learn from both of them and to reconcile the information of computer programs and that of experimental ones, creating synergies and combining capacity and knowledge", the modeler emphasizes.
The team, led from the UMU to different parts of the world, puts a pike in the Pages association, known worldwide in the field of climatology and with an organizational presence in all the congresses of the subject.
Funded by the United States and Switzerland, this think tank is organized into thematic working groups by the multiple sources used in your area.
One of them is Pages 2k, where Murcia's action is framed and which emphasizes research in the last two thousand years.
Although it is not a direct subsidy source, they provide visibility, co-finance the organization of small specialized congresses, mailing lists, etc.
One of the most important products of this network has been a compilation of reconstructions on a planetary scale, thus creating an immense data base on climate variability that is being exploited by researchers from around the world.
.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
Privacy policy
- Legal notice
- Cookies