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Atmospheric scientist argues for adaptability of techniques of atmospheric modeling

November 25th, 2014

How should we deploy the current resources, or those that may become available in the future, to improve the quantitative prediction of weather events with high societal and economic impact?

What are the best practices to provide quantitative estimates of the uncertainty of those predictions?

The ten year (2005-2014) THORPEX World Weather Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization has been the most important international, collaborative research effort of recent history to investigate these questions.

Texas A&M professor Istvan Szunyogh, who has served as one of the two Co-Chairs of the Dynamical Processes Working Group of THORPEX, gives an overview of the physical concepts and applied mathematical techniques that have been found the most useful in THORPEX in his book "Applicable Atmospheric Dynamics: Techniques for the Exploration of Atmospheric Dynamics" published with World Scientific.

He revisits classic concepts of atmospheric dynamics in light of the latest modeling results and describes techniques that have been developed in the last few years and are waiting for further refinements. Most techniques that fall into the latter group are related to the assimilation of observed information into the models.

The prediction of a complex system, such as the atmosphere, requires the collection of a large number of observations, and the assimilation of those observations into the computer models in real time. "Until very recently, data assimilation was viewed as a rather boring engineering aspect of numerical weather prediction.

Now it is widely recognized as a challenging, fundamental research issue for all complex dynamical systems: the state of such a system can be observed only partially, and often only indirectly by remote sensing techniques, which observe physical quantities that have a complicated dependence on the state of the system" says Szunyogh.

More information:
More information on the book can be found at: www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8047. The book retails for US$158 / £104.

Provided by World Scientific Publishing

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