“When did Noah build the ark? Before the flood. Before…” as Robert Redford, as senior spy Nathan Muir says, in the movie Spy Game.

Summer Hail in NYC

Mobile Apps are one way to get on board with building the ark before the flood.  Here’s one from the Red Cross: Hurricane App. Things you can do to prepare for the next severe weather:

• Download the Hurricane App
• Get water: 1 gallon of clean water per person per day stored at your place
• Back-up your power sources

But when the news predicts the next severe weather, will we believe them? How do those Apps really work, anyway?

Climate Modeling

Climate modeling is all about making believable predictions. Climate models simulate climate change in the past and predict weather in the future, based on trends in recorded data. A new site for understanding the climate is Climate 101, from the National Academy of Science. Have a look, to explore more on climate and climate models from a beginners perspective.

Politicians, insurance companies, businesses and farmers all make plans using weather predictions. The increase in sheer numbers of extreme storms make it important for all of us to plan now. These have caused huge losses in life around the world. Estimates of the economic losses from extreme weather in dollars come to 100′s of billions in the past few decades. Over $50 billion was lost in 2011 from 14 disasters - and that was before Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast US, estimated at $80 billion lost.

To guide the nation, a report on “The National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling” from the US National Research Council (NRC) focuses on getting groups to work together. Now, climate change has become the big issue. Climate modeling has made progress, but the rules of the game are changing fast. Because of climate changes and global warming, we can’t predict the future from the past. At least, not like we could before. Our natural world has changed.

The US National Research Council asked a select group to get key people together and figure out how to predict climate changes over the next 10 years. The new Report is their roadmap. They found that different groups of people are doing computer modeling of the weather. But they aren’t using the same systems or talking to each other. They are working in different places, different ways. The new report asks for climate modelers to work together collaboratively. The goal is to have 1 common modeling framework sharing software and data and tools.

The report asks the the US as a nation to:

1. Make common software
2. Meet yearly about climate modeling
3. Work together for forecasting, to collect data and make models
4. Develop training for climate interpreters, the new weather man/woman

They also recommend we study “uncertainty”, something we have so much more of now, in these days of global climate crisis. Master of uncertainty Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, “Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.”  The pay off for better planning together on climate change can only be good.

The full report is available freely to all at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13430

Related Articles

You may also be interested in:

Climate Etc, the blog 

After the Flood: Uncertainty and Disaster Planning

On uncertainty: The Black Swan