@Guardianeco Climate Scientists in race to predict natural disaster WHERE Will strike next bit.ly/aNu6M2
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment
Climate scientists in race to predict where natural disaster will strike next
Conference in Boulder will step up world's efforts to establish an early warning system for extreme weather events
Scientists around the world, specializing in climate change, schedule a meeting this week in the United States, with plans to create a warning system that could predict future weather disasters caused by global warming.
The meeting in Boulder, Colorado, was held at the diplomatic level amid fears of storms, hurricanes, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events, which now threaten to unleash havoc in the coming decades.
A series of weather disasters have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, as scientists warned that the figures so far this year suggest that 2010 will be the warmest on record.
Recent events include a record heat wave that has seen Moscow covered with smog from burning peat, the collapse of a giant ice island from the Greenland ice cap, and floods in Pakistan that killed at least 1,600 people and left 20 million homeless.
Scientists say that such events will become more severe and more frequent over the rest of the century.
Emissions of greenhouse gases, increasing trap the sun's heat in the lower atmosphere, and climate change on Earth, are causing climate change far earlier than initially predicted by climate scientists.
Scientists can not even identify exactly where and when the worst devastation will occur.
The goal of the Colorado meeting is to develop more accurate forecasting techniques to help identify the location and severity of droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, rising sea levels and other environmental disasters resulting from global warming before they happen and thus save thousands of lives.
"The events in Moscow and Pakistan concentrate the minds with much more urgency," said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office.
"On both sides of the Atlantic, we have been following what is happening in order to understand the causes need to help us provide better warnings of future disasters."
The meeting in Boulder, which was created by scientists in the world, three major meteorological organizations: the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the UK Met Office and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The aim, said Stott, would be to develop a modeling package that allow scientists to predict the type of events the world has been witnessing over the past few weeks - before the attack.
The fact that the Foreign Ministry to be involved in the creation of Ace, reveals the seriousness of the problem is the awareness of politicians.
Meteorologists have developed extremely effective techniques for predicting global climate change caused by greenhouse gases.
A paper by Stott and Myles Allen of Oxford University, predicted in 1999, using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, that by 2010 the global temperature would rise 0.8 ° C above the level of the Second World War.
This is precisely what is already happening, only in eu escalamaior than expected, and in less time.
But, although meteorologists have developed powerful techniques for the general prediction of climate trends - indicating that the weather patterns will be warmer and wetter in many areas - its ability to predict specific outcomes remains limited.
It is this problem that will be addressed as a matter of urgency at the meeting of Ace in Boulder.
An example of the complexity facing meteorologists, is provided by the weather system that is burning Moscow, said Stott.
"Moscow has a stable high pressure system over it, and who brought a heat wave in Europe in 2003. But for now the land around the city functioned as a natural air conditioner, keeping the cool air through the evaporation of moisture from the ground. But the land dried up and eventually there was no longer cold. Hence the high temperatures. "
The prediction of an event like this, scientists must be able to quantify all the variables involved, and also develop a very accurate model of the earth's surface, said Stott.
"These are the kinds of things we need to understand.
We must be able to predict the events of weeks or months before they occur, so that people can prevent its worst effects.
We also consider the context of long term and see if we need to build better defenses and the sea in one spot, and assess how the elevation of dikes or walls need to be.
Certainly, one thing is clear: no time to lose. The effects of global warming are already upon us. "
@Guardianeco Climate Scientists in race to predict natural disaster WHERE Will strike next bit.ly/aNu6M2
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