Monday, April 23, 2007

Think global, calculate local

"How high is Scotland? Given that it varies between sea level and 1344 metres at the top of Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, it might sound odd just to say 200m. But that was the height that had to be used in 2001 for the Met Office's Hadley Centre modelling of the Earth's atmosphere with its HadCM3 Global Climate Model, using the fastest supercomputers then available. The 3D world divided the Earth's atmosphere into boxes roughly 300km by 300km, and 40 "layers" (from 5km below the sea to 30km above it); the entire British Isles were covered by just five grid cells."

Source: The Guardian

This is one complicated article about a very complicated subject. No wonder there are so many heated discussions concerning globalwarming and how to calculate the effects of it.

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