Issues in Predictability

Abstract

Since the beginning of the greenhouse debate, policy makers have demanded from the scientific community predictions of future climate in limited geographical areas and limited time intervals. Current climate models clearly do not have such capabilities, as is demonstrated by large disagreements among the models of continental size regions. Largely lost in the debate are fundamental questions such as: What is meant by predictability? What can be predicted and over what time and length scale? What errors can be expected from predictions? This report explores some of the issues by analyzing toy models of climate and existing data sets of global annual average surface air temperature.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 30, 1991
Accession Number
ADA247211

Entities

People

  • G. Macdonald
  • H. Abarbanel
  • H. Levine
  • O. Rothaus
  • S. Koonin

Organizations

  • MITRE Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Electronic Warfare
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Temperature
  • Climate Change
  • Communities
  • Data Sets
  • Delphi Method
  • Eigenvalues
  • Equations
  • Frequency
  • Greenhouses
  • Military Research
  • Naval Warfare
  • Nonlinear Dynamics
  • Power Spectra
  • Statistical Distributions
  • Surface Temperature
  • Time Intervals
  • Undersea Warfare

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy Engineering.
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.