By Paul Homewood
Today’s junk science, courtesy of Princeton and NOAA:
In a report published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Climate Change, a team of Princeton and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have applied a key factor in improving climate models — correcting for sea surface temperatures — to the monsoon.
The report’s authors include Salvatore Pascale, an associate research scholar in atmospheric and oceanic sciences (AOS); Tom Delworth, a lecturer in geosciences and AOS and research scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL); Sarah Kapnick, a 2004 Princeton alumna and former AOS postdoc who is currently a research physical scientist at GFDL; AOS associate research scholar Hiroyuki Murakami; and Gabriel Vecchi, a professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute.
When they corrected for persistent sea-surface temperature (SST) biases and used higher-resolution data for the regional geography, the researchers created a model that accurately reflects current rainfall conditions and suggests that future changes could have significant consequences for regional water resources and hazards.
“This study represents fundamental science relating to the physics of the North American monsoon, but feeds back onto weather to climate predictions and building resiliency for our water supply and responses to hazards,” said Kapnick. “I am excited about this leap forward to improve our models and for the potential applications that they will provide in the future to society.”
Their results highlight the possibility of a strong precipitation reduction in the northern edge of the monsoon in response to warming, with consequences for regional water resources, agriculture and ecosystems.
“Monsoon rains are critical for the southwest U.S. and northwest Mexico, yet the fate of the North American monsoon is quite uncertain,” said Pascale, the lead author on the paper. “The future of the monsoon will have direct impacts on agriculture, on livelihoods.”
Previous general circulation models have suggested that the monsoons were simply shifting later, with decreased rains through July but increased precipitation in September and October.
“The consensus had been that global warming was delaying the monsoon … which is also what we found with the simulation if you didn’t correct the SST biases,” Pascale said. “Uncontrolled, the SST biases can considerably change the response. They can trick us, introducing artefacts that are not real.”
Once those biases were corrected for, the researchers discovered that the North American monsoon (NAM) is not simply delayed, but that the total precipitation is facing a dramatic reduction — up to 40 percent.
“Because much of the NAM region critically depends on summertime monsoonal rainfall, the results of [this research] underscore the necessity of planning future water resource management around the likelihood of reduced monsoonal rains,” said Benjamin Lintner, an associate professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, who was not involved in this study.
That has significant implications for regional policymakers, explained Kapnick. “Water infrastructure projects take years to a decade to plan and build and can last decades. They require knowledge of future climate … to ensure water supply in dry years. We had known previously that other broadly used global models didn’t have a proper North American monsoon. This study addresses this need and highlights what we need to do to improve models for the North American monsoon and understanding water in the southwest.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world:
And, for good measure, annual precipitation:
In any other walk of life, anybody who wrote such incompetent and dishonest work would be out of a job in 5 minutes flat.
Why Princeton University is allowing its prestigious name to be tarnished is a mystery.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 13, 2017 at 06:36AM
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