Detecting Hurricanes in Models of Earth's Future Climate

As climate models become increasingly more complex and precise, they also become potentially more useful for predicting the strength and intensity of hurricane seasons. Focusing on such small-scale events is however very difficult with appropriate tools. And these tools are now being developed.

“We’re using state-of-the-art methods in data mining and high performance computing to locate and quantify extreme weather phenomena in the very large datasets generated by today’s climate models,” says Prabhat.

He is a scientific visualization expert in the Berkeley Lab Computational Research Division. What he and his team want to learn is how climate change will impact the frequency of extreme weather over the coming decades, at least.

In the near future, computational tools will be able to derive instances of extreme weather, such as category 5 hurricanes, amidst the vast volumes of data that will be produced by advanced climate models.