Hi! I am back with a new post! Today's topic is the lecture summary by Dr Liong Shie-Yui.
Dr Liong Shie-Yui is from Tropical Marine Science Institute, Singapore. His topic for the day is Climate Change & Modelling.
Dr Liong started with what climate change is and how climate forecasting should be done. Climate change is also known as global warming which is the heating of the earth. Heating of the earth is caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmoshphere. The sunlight that enter the earth is unable to radiate out into the space. The greenhouse gas trapped the sunlight. Therefore, the trapped sunlight caused the earth to heat up year by year.
In his presentation, he shows data that the earth has been heating up since the start of Industrial Revolution in 1960. During Industrial Revolution, the increase release of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gas which form the increase greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is increasing every year. The most harmful gas, Nitrous oxide, is 380 times more potent than CO2. Reports have all shown that Human are the culprit behind all the pollution.
Dr Liong showed us a graph from a report that reduction of carbon dioxide emission, there will not be a immediate change to the temperature and sea level. It takes time to stabilize.
After that, he went through the future climate look like. He used SRES Scenarios which are illustrated by IPCC to discuss the climate outlook. IPCC stands for Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change. The worst scenario is A1FI which is fossil intensive. The B1 scenario is the most ideal case. B1 scenario will be more environment friendly with the use of clean and resource efficient technologies.
He gave a short introduction on IPCC. It is a intergovernment body established in 1988. It is set up by World Meteorological Organisation and United Nations Environment Programme. They collect data with the help of climate models known as GCMs to monitor the climate changes. General Circulation Models (GCMs) are produced by developed countries eg. USA and Germany. The size of GCM models ranges from 150km x 150km to 600km x 600km, 30km into the atmosphere and 5km below ocean level. There are uncertainities in some regions simulated by different GCMs.
To reduce the uncertainties level, Regional Climate Model (RCM) is used to gather detailed and more accurate analysis of the climate condition for particular country eg. Singapore.
As Singapore is a small island, our weather is largely affected by our neighbouring countries. When plotting a RCM to study Singapore weather, we must take into consideration Vietnam. The wind in Singapore is affected by the flow in Vietnam.
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The above summary is about speech given by Dr Liong Shie-Yui regarding climate change and modelling. There are 3 parts covered in the speech and they are overview of climate change, future climate behaviour and climate model which Hanxiong have covered in his summary.
ReplyDeleteAs for the overview of climate change, Hanxiong mentioned that human are the main culprit behind all the pollution and I would like to elaborate on this point. There are many human activites that emitted greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide make up the largest percentage of the greenhouse gases and they are caused by burning of fossil fuel, forest fire and peatlands. Industrial processes also emitted a lot of greenhouse gases such hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), sulfur hexafluoride and perfluorocarbons, which is belonged to the fluorinated gases group.
Next, for the future climate behaviour, the SRES scenarios are explained. There is an sharp increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the last 15 years as shown in some graph and there is a trend of increasing temperature change with increasing amount of carbon dioxide.
Finally, for the climate model, the GCM stand for Global Climate Model which Hanxiong stated it wrongly. The GCM is downscaled to RCM (Regional Climate Model) to achieve a more accurate result which in turn is used for hydrological impact studies.