Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden Street, mail-stop
16,
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
wsoon@cfa.harvard.edu
"Calculating the environmental impacts of increased
carbon dioxide in the air: The issue of climate model validation"
Increases in human-made minor greenhouse gases are assigned a
certain probability to cause large increases in surface and lower atmospheric
temperatures with disastrous global and regional environmental consequences.
Such estimates are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science
still in its infancy despite recent substantial strides in knowledge (IPCC
1990, 1996, and 2001). The credibility of the modelled global and regional
responses rests on the validity of the model. Because the expected human-made
climate forcings are relatively small when compared to various other natural,
internal and external forcing factors, we focus on the important question
of climate model validation. We shall review specific common deficiencies
in general circulation model calculations of atmospheric temperature, surface
temperature, precipitation and their space-time variability associated
with the complex problems of parameterization of the multiply interacting
climate components and feedbacks.