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There is a big observational campaign happening right now that is trying to get to the heart of this called EUREC4A (main website: http://eurec4a.eu http://eure

There is a big observational campaign happening right now that is trying to get to the heart of this called EUREC4A (main website: http://eurec4a.eu http://eurec4a.eu and information sheet: http://eurec4a.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eurec4a/2019/Press/EURECA4A_factsheet_uk_10_12_2019.pdf http://eurec4a.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eurec4a/2019/Press/E...). The key uncertainty between different climate models is whether shallow clouds in the tropics (which in general cool the Earth through radiation) will disappear or not and make our planet even warmer - some models predict this (!) We are 100s of individuals from more than 30 national and international partner institutions with planes, drones, ships, ground stations and autonomous buoys trying to understand how and why these clouds form, how that links to their environment, dust from Africa, the ocean current, the jetstream aloft, etc. The positions of the different platforms can be seen live on the main website and the data we are producing is appearing on there too. If you have any questions about what we're doing I'd be very happy to help or point you towards the right people :)

Angostura 7y ago
I suppose my immediate question is - is there any way for an non-professional with a pair of eyes and a smartphone to contribute in a crowd-sourcy way?
- qubex 7y ago
  Why do you want to a horde of “non-professional[s] with a pair of eyes and a smartphone” to contribute if literally hundreds of professionals with high-end equipment, meteorological observation satellites, and oodles of computational firepower are already on the task? The main problem has never been a lack of science, the problem has always been (and alas, continues to be) a lack of political wherewithal to actually rapidly implement the drastic steps necessary to avoid the worst outcomes. Maybe we’re finally getting what we collectively deserve?
  - bumby 7y ago
    I think what precedes the problem you mention (and one of the main points in the article) is the problem of generating reduced uncertainty in the model. Maybe there’s a chance for more granular data to enhance that?
    - qubex 7y ago
      The problem isn’t the granularity of observations, it’s the granularity of the grid with which the simulations are run. As I understand it (by analogy with my own field of macroeconomics) the current limit is the fact that the grid is coarser than the average size of a cloud, and that therefore cloud cover needs to be approximated. That is the real source of uncertainty.
      - bumby 7y ago
        Interesting. So is the grid limited due to computational complexity, like the mesh in finite element analysis?
        qubex 7y ago
        Precisely. But don’t take my word for it. If you’re into a light introduction, consider watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s interview of Tim Palmer (a theoretical physicist’s interview of a leading climatologist is a thing of beauty in its own right).
      - Angostura 7y ago
        > The problem isn’t the granularity of observations Perhaps you should tell the people who are running the "big observational campaign happening right now" that they can pack up and go home.
    - qubex 7y ago
      I don’t know why you are being down-voted but IMHO you certainly don’t deserve to be.
      - bumby 7y ago
  - allovernow 7y ago
    >Why do you want to a horde of “non-professional[s] with a pair of eyes and a smartphone” to contribute if literally hundreds of professionals with high-end equipment, meteorological observation satellites, and oodles of computational firepower are already on the task? Because the Earth is huge, data collection is expensive, and funds are limited. There is a lot of [literal] ground to cover and it's perfectly feasible to augment professional work with amateur data, now that pressure, temperature, and location sensors are relatively cheap and ubiquitous.
    - qubex 7y ago
      Satellites view half the globe at once. But you know that just as well as I do.
      - colejohnson66 7y ago
        Not true. How much is seen depends on the focal length and lens
        qubex 7y ago
        I suppose that’s true, abstractly speaking. But does it make sense to assume that the world’s meteorological community would put satellites into geosynchronous orbit that are not suited for the purpose of observing the Earth’s atmosphere from geosynchronous orbit? I think we can safely discount that assumption.
        majewsky 7y ago
        You're assuming that "observing the Earth's atmosphere" is a yes/no question when it's actually a spectrum. I'm not familiar with the matter, but I can imagine a scenario like "We need to record a very particular part of the EM spectrum and all those existing satellites happen not to have suitable equipment for that."
        jobigoud 7y ago
        And distance. A satellite in polar orbit at 850km above the surface will only see a small part of the globe at once, even with a wide lens.
- monkeynotes 7y ago
  Seems like a recipe for bad data and undiscoverable flaws.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Not really; you'd probably take the Folding@Home approach† to work distribution: assign each small piece as a job to N non-trustworthy "workers" (humans, computers), and then trust the results if all N results concur. If they don't, fail the job back into the work queue to be tried again later with different workers. (And maybe give the workers a reputation score, kicking out the ones who participate in enough failed jobs.) † does this general strategy have a name?
    - gvurrdon 7y ago
      There's already a related climate project: https://www.climateprediction.net/ https://www.climateprediction.net/ I used to work for them a few years ago.
    - Kliment 7y ago
      Closest I can think of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy
    - xvilka 7y ago
      Yes, it's called BOINC[1] platform. And as another comment mentioned there is already a climate prediction project[2] based on that platform. [1] https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ [2] https://www.cpdn.org https://www.cpdn.org
  - Angostura 7y ago
    Not if done correctly. See this as an excellent example: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/snapshot-serengeti https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/snapshot-sere...
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    iNaturalist.org does this for finding plants and animals but to be honest, I don't know how they deal with bad data. They even have schoolkids submitting data during class. So, kind of adversarial data collectors!
- sp332 7y ago
  Yeah - get out the vote.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    Well, thank you for that helpful suggestion. I was interested in knowing whether the research needed more data points and if so, whether a 'citizen scientist' could contribute.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - aldoushuxley001 7y ago
    If I could downvote you I would, but this comment will have to suffice.
mondoshawan 7y ago
Can we get the source for the models?
- qubex 7y ago
  http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm4.0/ http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm4.0/ seems to offer what you are looking for (first Google hit for “NCAR climate model source code”) but without a cluster of supercomputing nodes, what are you planning to do with it?
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    ESCM is a smaller one and it seems there are transport matrix models which could be small enough for a single workstation?
  - mondoshawan 7y ago
    Study it. Read the source. Maybe adapt it to a system that isnt a supercomputer. We'll see.
- konamicode 7y ago
  This is mentioned elsewhere in the comments at least some of the code for climateprediction.net appears to be on GitHub: https://github.com/CPDN-git https://github.com/CPDN-git.
pepijndevos 7y ago
How do these models address overfitting? I'm sure this is taken good care of, but from just reading the article it almost sounds like some details were added to make it fit recent changes better.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  You don't really optimise parameters for large scale climate models, you put in your best guess at the initial values and then wait for weeks to months depending on your goal. With function evaluations that costly, I don't really see how you have time to overfit. The big worry is bias, a lot of assumptions about how physics can be approximated are needed to make these models, but there isn't time to test every combination of them at the full scale. So you do small scale tests and hope nothing unexpected happens in the full run. For scale, a performance basline paper from 2018 reports achiving 0.23 simulated years per wall clock day using 4900 GPU cores [1]. [1]: https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/1665/2018/gmd-11-1665-2018.pdf https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/1665/2018/gmd-11-1665-20...
gerytu 7y ago
Can you talk about the process of depositing materials into the atmosphere behind airplanes, euphemistically being called "Stratospheric Aerosol Injection" by the United States government? What materials are being used, how often are they being sprayed, where in the world, and what is the proposed environmental impact of blanketing the skies in the stuff? When you go outside and look up and see streaks of stringy clouds being laid, one after another, which then spread and cover the once-blue into a giant tapestry of pulled cotton, are these all deliberate depositions of foreign material into the upper atmosphere? It seems like sulfuric acid is one such component of the mixtures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... . I remember learning about the detrimental effects of acid rain in elementary school. Is it true that we've actually been spraying the skies for decades, that all the ridicule levied against those concerned by this practice has been a disinformation campaign to silence legitimate concern, and now we've codified the act in a new package to deliver to the masses so we can convince them that the thing that's been denied for so long is actually being done, and it's good for us? When you are observing cloud formation, how do you know whether it's a "real" cloud or a man-made cloud?

Angostura 7y ago

I suppose my immediate question is - is there any way for an non-professional with a pair of eyes and a smartphone to contribute in a crowd-sourcy way?

qubex 7y ago
Why do you want to a horde of “non-professional[s] with a pair of eyes and a smartphone” to contribute if literally hundreds of professionals with high-end equipment, meteorological observation satellites, and oodles of computational firepower are already on the task? The main problem has never been a lack of science, the problem has always been (and alas, continues to be) a lack of political wherewithal to actually rapidly implement the drastic steps necessary to avoid the worst outcomes. Maybe we’re finally getting what we collectively deserve?
- bumby 7y ago
  I think what precedes the problem you mention (and one of the main points in the article) is the problem of generating reduced uncertainty in the model. Maybe there’s a chance for more granular data to enhance that?
  - qubex 7y ago
    The problem isn’t the granularity of observations, it’s the granularity of the grid with which the simulations are run. As I understand it (by analogy with my own field of macroeconomics) the current limit is the fact that the grid is coarser than the average size of a cloud, and that therefore cloud cover needs to be approximated. That is the real source of uncertainty.
    - bumby 7y ago
      Interesting. So is the grid limited due to computational complexity, like the mesh in finite element analysis?
      - qubex 7y ago
        Precisely. But don’t take my word for it. If you’re into a light introduction, consider watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s interview of Tim Palmer (a theoretical physicist’s interview of a leading climatologist is a thing of beauty in its own right).
    - Angostura 7y ago
      > The problem isn’t the granularity of observations Perhaps you should tell the people who are running the "big observational campaign happening right now" that they can pack up and go home.
  - qubex 7y ago
    I don’t know why you are being down-voted but IMHO you certainly don’t deserve to be.
    - bumby 7y ago
- allovernow 7y ago
  >Why do you want to a horde of “non-professional[s] with a pair of eyes and a smartphone” to contribute if literally hundreds of professionals with high-end equipment, meteorological observation satellites, and oodles of computational firepower are already on the task? Because the Earth is huge, data collection is expensive, and funds are limited. There is a lot of [literal] ground to cover and it's perfectly feasible to augment professional work with amateur data, now that pressure, temperature, and location sensors are relatively cheap and ubiquitous.
  - qubex 7y ago
    Satellites view half the globe at once. But you know that just as well as I do.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Not true. How much is seen depends on the focal length and lens
      - qubex 7y ago
        I suppose that’s true, abstractly speaking. But does it make sense to assume that the world’s meteorological community would put satellites into geosynchronous orbit that are not suited for the purpose of observing the Earth’s atmosphere from geosynchronous orbit? I think we can safely discount that assumption.
        majewsky 7y ago
        You're assuming that "observing the Earth's atmosphere" is a yes/no question when it's actually a spectrum. I'm not familiar with the matter, but I can imagine a scenario like "We need to record a very particular part of the EM spectrum and all those existing satellites happen not to have suitable equipment for that."
      - jobigoud 7y ago
        And distance. A satellite in polar orbit at 850km above the surface will only see a small part of the globe at once, even with a wide lens.
monkeynotes 7y ago
Seems like a recipe for bad data and undiscoverable flaws.
- derefr 7y ago
  Not really; you'd probably take the Folding@Home approach† to work distribution: assign each small piece as a job to N non-trustworthy "workers" (humans, computers), and then trust the results if all N results concur. If they don't, fail the job back into the work queue to be tried again later with different workers. (And maybe give the workers a reputation score, kicking out the ones who participate in enough failed jobs.) † does this general strategy have a name?
  - gvurrdon 7y ago
    There's already a related climate project: https://www.climateprediction.net/ https://www.climateprediction.net/ I used to work for them a few years ago.
  - Kliment 7y ago
    Closest I can think of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Yes, it's called BOINC[1] platform. And as another comment mentioned there is already a climate prediction project[2] based on that platform. [1] https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ [2] https://www.cpdn.org https://www.cpdn.org
- Angostura 7y ago
  Not if done correctly. See this as an excellent example: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/snapshot-serengeti https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/snapshot-sere...
- lopmotr 7y ago
  iNaturalist.org does this for finding plants and animals but to be honest, I don't know how they deal with bad data. They even have schoolkids submitting data during class. So, kind of adversarial data collectors!
sp332 7y ago
Yeah - get out the vote.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Well, thank you for that helpful suggestion. I was interested in knowing whether the research needed more data points and if so, whether a 'citizen scientist' could contribute.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- aldoushuxley001 7y ago
  If I could downvote you I would, but this comment will have to suffice.

mondoshawan 7y ago

Can we get the source for the models?

qubex 7y ago
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm4.0/ http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm4.0/ seems to offer what you are looking for (first Google hit for “NCAR climate model source code”) but without a cluster of supercomputing nodes, what are you planning to do with it?
- marmaduke 7y ago
  ESCM is a smaller one and it seems there are transport matrix models which could be small enough for a single workstation?
- mondoshawan 7y ago
  Study it. Read the source. Maybe adapt it to a system that isnt a supercomputer. We'll see.
konamicode 7y ago
This is mentioned elsewhere in the comments at least some of the code for climateprediction.net appears to be on GitHub: https://github.com/CPDN-git https://github.com/CPDN-git.

pepijndevos 7y ago

How do these models address overfitting? I'm sure this is taken good care of, but from just reading the article it almost sounds like some details were added to make it fit recent changes better.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
You don't really optimise parameters for large scale climate models, you put in your best guess at the initial values and then wait for weeks to months depending on your goal. With function evaluations that costly, I don't really see how you have time to overfit. The big worry is bias, a lot of assumptions about how physics can be approximated are needed to make these models, but there isn't time to test every combination of them at the full scale. So you do small scale tests and hope nothing unexpected happens in the full run. For scale, a performance basline paper from 2018 reports achiving 0.23 simulated years per wall clock day using 4900 GPU cores [1]. [1]: https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/1665/2018/gmd-11-1665-2018.pdf https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/1665/2018/gmd-11-1665-20...

gerytu 7y ago

Can you talk about the process of depositing materials into the atmosphere behind airplanes, euphemistically being called "Stratospheric Aerosol Injection" by the United States government? What materials are being used, how often are they being sprayed, where in the world, and what is the proposed environmental impact of blanketing the skies in the stuff? When you go outside and look up and see streaks of stringy clouds being laid, one after another, which then spread and cover the once-blue into a giant tapestry of pulled cotton, are these all deliberate depositions of foreign material into the upper atmosphere? It seems like sulfuric acid is one such component of the mixtures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... . I remember learning about the detrimental effects of acid rain in elementary school. Is it true that we've actually been spraying the skies for decades, that all the ridicule levied against those concerned by this practice has been a disinformation campaign to silence legitimate concern, and now we've codified the act in a new package to deliver to the masses so we can convince them that the thing that's been denied for so long is actually being done, and it's good for us? When you are observing cloud formation, how do you know whether it's a "real" cloud or a man-made cloud?