Los Alamos National Laboratory

Model Mixes Ice, Heat, Water and Salt to View the Ocean’s Future

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The concern has been that as the ocean surface warms and ice melts rather than solidifying, the added fresh water at the surface, having less salt content, would not sink.  This could slow the ocean circulation and ironically have an ominous chilling (rather than warming) effect on Europe.

Ironically, climate modeling shows that though melting sea ice does slow thermohaline circulation, the cooling effect is largely counterbalanced by global warming.  As Jones puts it, “The fact that the northern latitudes are warming faster than the rest of the globe tends to overwhelm the fact that you are missing a little bit of ocean circulation.  So we are less worried about that scenario than we used to be.  I guess that’s good news in a sense, although I would not want people to get complacent.”

Impact Scenarios

The COSIM group receives support from DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and from DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which matches mathematics and computational science with physical scientists in various areas.  Climate modeling has been going on at Los Alamos for some 16 years, and Jones has been a part of it almost from the beginning.

Its work is part of the larger Community Climate System Model (CCSM), headquartered at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which is based in Boulder, Colorado, and supported by the National Science Foundation.  The two groups jointly develop the model and use it to project climate change scenarios.

As part of the CCSM collaboration, the Los Alamos group also feeds data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which uses them in its influential climate change reports (see sidebar).

Jones says that since his group’s inception, models have gotten good enough “that we feel much more confident in believing in what we are predicting.” That’s partly due to a collaboration with computational scientists at DOE’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, who help ensure the COSIM team gets optimum performance from the Oak Ridge-based Cray computers they use for modeling.

The DOE is interested in climate change because of its impact on the nation’s energy portfolio.  “The DOE is tasked with determining what are ‘safe levels of carbon dioxide’ in the atmosphere,” says Jones.  This information helps determine what will be used to generate power in the future — “Whether it’s still going to be coal and oil or whether we need to put more emphasis on other forms of energy,” he adds.

From Stars To Earth

Jones is trained as an astrophysicist, and comes to modeling global warming’s effects on oceans and sea ice from studying how heat is transported from the inside of a star to the surface. Though the temperatures are quite different, the fluid dynamics are essentially the same.

When he joined Los Alamos as a post-doctoral fellow, Jones applied his knowledge of fluid dynamics to study fluid motions inside the Earth. “The similarity among these is that they all require high-end computation and the same fluid equations,” he explains.

When he isn’t modeling the oceans and sea ice or spending time with his family, Jones entertains the public with his trombone, which he has played since fourth grade.  He has an eclectic repertoire, and performs with the Los Alamos Symphony, the Los Alamos Big Band (which plays ’40s and ’50s dance tunes), and a brass quartet that plays everything from baroque music to Dixieland jazz.

Clearly, Jones is a man for all seasons and temperature climes.

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