Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
MAJOR INITIATIVE Center for Global Change Science Seeks Better Climate Understanding By Eugene F. Mallove News Office When MIT's Center for Global Change Science opened last month, a major new initiative began that focuses on long-standing scientific problems whose solutions bear on predicting possible changes in the global environment. Through the Center, MIT will bring to bear its collective wisdom on such difficult scientific questions as global climate change, the destruction of stratospheric ozone and sea level rise. The long range goal of the Center is to apply theory and observations to understand the complex mechanisms that control the global environment in an effort to predict environmental changes over the next century with some accuracy. The Center is interdisciplinary, involving both research and education, and builds on the programs in meteorology, oceanography, and hydrology at MIT. It presently includes faculty members from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and from the Departments of Civil Engineering and Chemistry. The director of the new Center is Professor Ronald Prinn of EAPS and the associate director is Rafael Bras of civil engineering. The Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the department through which the Center will be administered, is headed by Professor Thomas Jordan. Professor Prinn says, "To achieve its goals in time to allow meaningful technological and political response to global change, it will be necessary for the Center to broaden and accelerate substantially MIT's present global change research program. The new Center is already advertising for several new faculty members and is seeking major support from the government, industry, and individuals. A major reorganization and expansion of MIT's teaching program in global change science is also underway." The initial focus of the Center will be on five fundamental processes that are at work in the complex global climate machine: (1)Atmospheric convection and cloud formation; (2) Ocean circulation and processes that couple ocean and atmosphere; (3) Land surface hydrology and the coupling of hydrology with vegetation; (4) The origin, dispersal, and destruction of the greenhouse gases--their biogeochemistry, and (5) The chemistry and circulation of the upper atmosphere. The Center holds two longer term and broader objectives: (1) To construct a new generation of circulation and climate prediction models with varying degrees of complexity, which incorporate advances in knowledge of the fundamental climate processes, and (2) To analyze existing global observations and acquire key new ones in order to: (a) Test and improve the new generation models and, (b) Use these to provide further knowledge of fundamental processes (by so-called mathematical inverse methods). The possibility of climate change is currently the focus of enormous public attention and even controversy. However, the dispassionate perspective under which the Center intends to operate is stated, in part, in the organizational plan: "As scientific understanding of causal mechanisms for environmental change has improved in recent years, there has been a concomitant growth in public awareness of the susceptibility of the present environment to significant regional and global change. "Such change has occurred in the past as exemplified by the ice ages, and is predicted to occur over the next century due to the continued rise in the concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The accuracy of current predictions of global climate change is, however, highly uncertain. This is because current climate models, including the most sophisticated three-dimensional general circulation models, have serious shortcomings. . . "While it may be possible to improve somewhat on this situation by utilizing more and more powerful computers and attempting to incorporate whatever present understanding exists for the fundamental processes, we believe that accurate climate prediction will not be possible until an adequate scientific understanding is obtained of the fundamental processes themselves. Only then will these processes and their associated feedbacks be able to be included realistically in general circulation climate models." The roster of other MIT faculty members presently involved with the Center includes: Professors Edward Boyle, Kerry Emanuel,Richard Lindzen, Mario Molina, Reginald Newell, Alan Plumb, Peter Stone, and Carl Wunsch of EAPS; Sallie Chisholm, Peter Eagleson, Harold Hemond and Francois Morel of civil engineering. Though they represent a spectrum of scientific viewpoints on climate change, the Center members are unified in their quest to improve scientific understanding of the global climate system.