Modelling Climate Changes

[Music plays and the Maths inside, UTS, AAMT and CSIRO logos and text appears: Investigating the maths inside, Modelling Climate Changes]

 

[Images move through to show sail boats on the horizon, a side view of Michael in the foreground looking out at the ocean, the sail boats again and then a rear view of Michael looking over the ocean]

 

Michael Grose: Our weather, including extreme events of weather such as floods and heat waves, have a big economic, social and environmental impact in Australia.

 

[Image changes to show a side view of Michael looking at the Investigator ship and then the image changes to show Michael walking down off a ship]

 

Understanding them and managing the risk from those extreme events will save us money, save the environment and it will lead to a stronger society.

 

[Image changes to show Michael smiling at the camera and then text appears: Michael Grose, Research Scientist, CSIRO]

 

Hello, I’m Michael Grose. I’m a Research Scientist at CSIRO’s Climate Science Centre.

 

[Music plays and the image shows a globe rotating in the background with mathematics symbols flashing in the foreground and text appears: #MATHEMATICS]

 

[Image changes to show Michael talking to the camera]

 

My job involves looking at data, looking at model outputs and understanding our weather, understanding our climate, and how climate might change in the future.

 

[Images move through to show storm clouds and lightning moving across the sky, crops in the rain moving in the wind, a person in gumboots walking through mud, a flooded creek, and a person snow skiing]

 

All of us are affected by the weather and climate to some degree. Some industries are heavily exposed to the weather and climate and climate impacts, including agriculture, infrastructure, tourism and many others.

 

[Images move through to show a flooded river and then the image changes to show Michael talking to the camera]

 

To work out what’s happening in the future we can’t just take it as being an extrapolation of what’s happened in the past.

 

[Images move through of a side view of Michael in his office, his hands typing on the keyboard, a rear view of Michael looking at a graph on the computer and then a side view of Michael’s face]

 

We need to understand the processes behind what’s driving the climate and climate changes and make a model of those climate elements and how they interact and how they respond to forces such as extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and we need to take account of all of those different processes and interactions and make a projection of what we think is likely under various future scenarios of those driving forces.

 

[Images move through to show Michael talking to the camera, digital weather boxes flipping over to show a climate graph with present and future weather predictions displayed, and then a graph built with 3D cubes]

 

A model divides the world up into a series of boxes. Then we can solve all the equations that drive a climate in each of those boxes and understand how it operates, how it behaves and how it responds to things like greenhouse gases.

 

[Images move through to show measurements added to digital 3D cubes, a digital cross-section of a mountain and surrounding forest, a weather map depicting rainfall and temperature and Michael talking to the camera]

 

Even with super computers that we have today, we tend to run the models at about 100 to 200 kilometres resolution, that’s our box size, up into the atmosphere and down into the ocean with boxes simulating and solving all those equations in a series of time steps in a simulation.

 

[Image changes to show a digital climate analogue]

 

So, there’s a range of maths in all aspects of weather and climate research.

 

[Images move through to show Michael talking to the camera, a rear view of Michael looking at a weather observation chart and a trend analysis map and text appears: Average, Median, Range, Maximum, Minimums, Trend Analysis]

 

So, the statistics of weather and climate over long periods and observations, so things like calculating averages, medians, ranges, maximums, minimums, trends, trend analysis and many more.

 

[Images move through to show a slowly rotating digital diorama of a mountain and surrounding forest with arrows depicting cloud movement and temperature and text appears: Atmosphere, Oceans, Land surface, Biosphere]

 

Once we’ve got a lot of data of observations and we’ve got a lot of model simulations, and we’ve got a good understanding of what is likely to happen under various future scenarios, then we can communicate that through, through mathematics.

 

[Image morphs into a slowly rotating world globe]

 

So, it’s ranges of change, changes to the averages, changes to the extremes, changes to the variability under different scenarios of future climate change and then converting that into things that people can understand more intuitively. So, more relatable.

 

[Images changes to show a visualisation weather map of the globe and then camera zooms in to show Australia on the map and then the image changes to show Michael talking to the camera]

 

So, things like visualisation tools where we can see what the conditions look like now and what they might look like in future if that climate change occurs.

 

[Image changes to show a side view of Michael in front of his computer showing a visualisation map and then the camera zooms in on the map and then the image changes to show the fluid dynamics simulation chart]

 

So, this is a visualisation of the conditions right now and this uses observations that combines it with a mathematical model to produce a visualisation of what the weather systems are doing, or the ocean currents are doing, and you can see the real fluid dynamics in the movement of the air currents and the ocean currents.

 

[Image changes to show Luke Diddams talking to the camera and text appears: Luke Diddams National Resources Management (NRM)]

 

Luke Diddams: The NRM South works with all different sorts of agencies and organisations, all the way from government, both state, federal, local government, all the way through to industry and even our local partners and players, volunteer groups, all the way through.

 

[Images move through to show Luke flipping through a Strategy manual]

 

 

A key part of my role is to develop the strategic priorities for natural resource management in the southern part of Tasmania.

 

[Images move through of Luke talking to the camera, Michael sitting at his computer, a weather map, a climate analogue chart and Luke talking to the camera]

 

The science and information that sits behind decision making is just so complex and I guess what we’ve managed to do is to use the information and knowledge products that have come from the CSIRO and other organisations to basically have very simple messaging that we can share with our communities and with industry players and others to help them understand the importance and the changes that may occur at the time in the near future.

 

[Camera zooms in on Luke’s face as he talks to the camera]

 

I rely on people who work at the CSIRO and other agencies like that to really do all that number crunching and use those computers, those super computers in the background to run these models, to bring it all together so that they can bring to us all these nice simple messages which we can then use to develop knowledge products and to take to our communities.

 

[Image changes to show a digital graph with a cube depicting speed and degrees of the climate in the foreground and then the image changes to show a rotating digital diorama of a mountain and forest]

 

Michael Grose: Climate models are very complex. They take a lot of computing power and they aim to simulate the entire global climate system and they generally do a good job, but they do need to be evaluated against real data and real observations.

 

[Image changes to show two weather maps of Australia side by side and then the image changes to show an animated global warming map and text appears above the weather maps: Computer Model, Satellite Image]

 

So, they’re continually updated, they’re continually evaluated and assessed to see how, how accurately they simulate the climate system as we know it and what we can use them for in the future.

 

[Images move through of a side view of Michael talking to the camera, a front view of Michael talking to the camera, a visualisation map and then a rotating globe]

 

All of the research, maths and science we put into understanding the climate, making climate projections of what we think is likely, communicating that to various groups such as the NRM groups and Luke, and then those people taking it further and taking it into real world decisions really shows that this research has a direct and relevant application to society and the real world.

 

[Images move through to show a side view of Michael, Michael typing on his keyboard, a rear view of Michael looking at a climate analogue on his desktop, and then Michael talking to the camera]

 

I’ve always been interested in science and maths and particularly the science of the natural world and I just pursued that without a particular direction in mind. I didn’t have an overall plan of what job I wanted to do.

 

[Image changes to show a side view of Michael talking and then the image changes to show Michael standing and looking at the ship the Investigator and then the image shows Michael walking towards the ship] 

 

So, I just followed my interest and I got involved in some really interesting areas, like marine science, studying the oceans, there was work in Antarctica and studying sea ice, and now with looking at the climate and making climate projections.

 

[Image shows Michael standing and looking at the CSIRO ship and then the image shows Michael turning and walking away from the ship and then the image changes to show Michael talking to the camera]

 

And they’ve all been really interesting jobs just through following my interests and my passion in science and maths.

 

[Music plays and text appears on a black screen: Reproduced by permission of CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2017 Commonwealth of Australia]

 

[Maths Inside logo and text appears: Investigating the maths inside, Maths Inside is a project led by University of Technology Sydney, and funded by the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training under the Australian Maths and Sciences Partnership Program, The aim of Maths Inside is to increase engagement of secondary school students in mathematics, by using rich tasks that show the ways it is used in real world applications, To find out more about this project and other AMSPP resources, please go to http://dimensions.aamt.edu.au, Maths Inside 2016 except where otherwise indicated, the Maths Inside materials may be used, reproduced, communicated and adapted free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes provided all acknowledgements associated with the material are retained, Maths Inside is a UTS project in collaboration with CSIRO and AAMT]