EGU

By stoat on April 17, 2007.

Its EGU time again. Monday was a bit of a blur (technically I got to my hotel on monday, about half past midnight. Travelling Air Austria is a lot more pleasant than RyanAir, though).

Tuesday was better, partly because I gave up on the stupid "personal programme" stuff the site lets you build on-line and simply got one of the huge book-blocks of sessions.

Morning: global dimming/brightening. More stuff pretty well confirming the old: that GD masked increasing GHG forcing up till 1980 ish; and we've seen "brightening" since then (e.g. Wild). nb the conf search engine is here.

Ray Bradley giving his Hans Oeschger Medal lecture on palaeo reconstructions. Speleotherms are the future. Martin Juckes looked at the differences - principally during the LIA - and decided this was probably due to just different data selection. Bradley had pointed out that the agreement during the MWP may just have been due to the sparsity of data then. Nothing from the CA-type people, even in the posters.

Hello to JA and JH.

After lunch, Wouter on Antarctic sea ice followed by some Drake passage transects. And now the posters: Richard Wood has a nice one on THC stability: a simple 4-box model (oh no not again!) but good because they try setting the params from model (hadcm3) and obs and look at how the hysterisis varies with params. Hadcm3 turns out to be miles away from the "off" state (blamed on the hydrological cycle) but obs don't look close to "off" to me either.

Computing infrastructure type session:Kirk on the planet simulator. This has cute in-run graphics and could be a good choice for download-your-own-model types but he doesn't say a lot about its accuracy. Then a chap from Cray about "hybrid architecture" which is the thing to come... Another grid-distributed system (looked very nice but does it work?); and the MESSy modular earth submodel system. There are a lot of people making cute new coupling systems and model systems, but who can test out all of them? Will they fight it out? And how good are the actual resulting codes, even if they are nicely written from a comp-sci viewpoint.

More later?

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climate science
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Free Thought

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As a sometime caver (who has helped paleo types collect a sample or two) I'm happy to hear that people were talking up speleothems. :-)

BTW I can follow most of your acronyms but what does CA stand for as in "CA-type people"?

[The Dark Side - climateaudit -W]