>> Thanks to NOAA and the Climate Stewards Program for
allowing me to present on this webinar.
I'm really excited that a lot of people signed up,
so that's really cool.
I know between the Paris Climate talks and the emphasis
of modeling in the next generation science standards.
This is sort of a apropos time for this topic.
So it's great to see people out there.
I'm glad I can't actually see, I might be a little nervous
with a number of folks.
Anyhow, my goal here is t and do sort of two things
around models and climate education.
One is to show some models, both computer-based ones and
sort of more hands-on activity ones that allow you to kind of
play around with modeling topics and see how models and
simulations can be used in climate education.
And also hopefully to shed some light on how the computer
models that are used climate prediction.
The big thing that is it's run on super computers.
To give you a bit of a glimpse at some of the aspects of how
those work and what -- how they do what they do,
what the issues are with why super computers are needed
and so forth.
I certainly can't give a comprehensive overview of
everything about climate models and everything about use
simulations and education in an hour,
but we got here together this will be just a little
teaser taste test of a few things and hopefully,
they will get you at least started in playing around in
this realm or give you some ideas if you're
already doing things along these lines of other things you
might want to play with.
Here is a quick overview of my main topic for tonight.
I'm going to show a computer based interactive that we have
developed here called energy balance that kind of gets at
how one can calculate the global temperature for a planet
at sort of the most fundamental level and also introduces the
idea of why the greenhouse effects to some extent is a
good thing which will lead into further discussion on the
greenhouse effect.
Then we will take a look at a physical model developed by a
group here in Colorado called the Little Shop of Physics.
It is kind of like a board game that illustrates how a model of
the atmosphere works by kind of moving chips around by
atmosphere layer and the greenhouse effect.
Then, jump back to another computer-based simulation that
we developed here called the very,
very simple climate model that illustrates sort of what if
scenarios of what our emissions might be over the coming
century and how that impacts temperature and gives you a
little bit move a sense of how the big boy models work and how
they can be used to make guesstimates about what's going
on in the future.
And then, I'll do a little bit of a popery at the end of some
odds and end things we accumulated a number of games
and simulations related to atmosphere science from a bunch
of different sources, NOAA, NASA,
different universities that can kind of
round up in one place to have you do a little bit of one stop
shopping that you might want to use in your teaching.
And then just a couple of other just smaller side bar things,
tree ring simulation for any of you that work in paleoclimate
and a couple of other things that may be relevant.
We will see how much time there is at the end to get to all of
those.
Let's see, I guess Bruce gave you kind of the rundown of my
educational background.
I'll describe my current position and where I work on
the next slide a little bit I been at NCcar or UCcar which I
will use kind of interchangeably,
I been here for about 12 years in Colorado in Boulder.
And as Bruce mentioned, my passion is for developing
simulations and games.
I've done a fair amount of work of various educational
technologies developing on-line course and web pages and do a
moderate amount of teacher professor development of online
and face to face.
The institution I work at is the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, a large federally funded weather
climate and atmospheric science research center so we got a
bunch of scientists here doing climate modeling,
flying airplanes around, sampling the atmosphere,
building new kinds of weather stations using 2-D printers and
a whole lot of cool stuff.
It's a neat place to work in one of our premier atmospheric
science and climate modeling labs in the world so we get a
lot of interesting guest speakers.
It's set at a really beautiful setting up
against the mountains here in Boulder,
very inspiring place to work.
I technically work for U/Car which is the University
Corporation of Atmospheric Research.
It's basically a consortium of the universities that has
atmospheric science development that have kind of oversight and
provides direction to the National Center.
So it's one of those splitting hairs as far as whether I'm
referred to as somebody who works for U/Car N/Car depending
on what audience.
You can assume they a interchangeably.
You notice my sides, they all say UCar because that's
technically where I live but thinking of it as being someone
that work as education group at the mat center is probably the
most straightforward way for you to understand where I'm at.
One thing I would like to start off with that I always try to
mention when I'm talking with teachers,
particularly about modeling and education is this great quote
from fellows who now, I think it's sort of a retired
professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin but a
systems engineer that came up with this quote back in the
early 50's, a George Box said essentially,
"all models are wrong but some models are useful." Now,
some people prefer to use all models are limited or all
models are approximations but getting across to your students
that this is not reality, this is not exactly precisely 100
percent predictive, but in cases,
these models tell us things that are of value.
Not in all cases, some models actually are not that good but
none of them are perfect and I think being straight up with
your students about that and discussing with them where
might this model break or where might it not be good at
predicting this important thing to make them understand that
computers are not a reality, they are an approximation of
it.
One thing I won't do in t seminar is present sort of
full-blown but scaled down for educational use type of
computer models.
There are some of those kinds of things out there.
I think they are great tools.
They are a little bit of a learning curve to get into
them.
And I have -- well, somebody has already done that and that
learning curve part, the making it a little more accessible
with some similar models that show parts of systems where I
focus my work.
So if any of you are familiar with Ed GCM which is a sort of
full-blown climate model that' been scaled down to run on
micro computers.
I think it's Columbia University.
If any of you are familiar with the world climate simulation
and their sea rose simulators, those are the kind of things
that I would recommend you look into especially if you're doing
this at the high end with maybe AP students at the high school
level or something like that.
But otherwise, I'm not going to to go much there.
I'm going to focus more on sort of smaller bits and pieces that
can maybe build up to use of that kind of thing there.
I think before I jump into the first of these
simulations, I'd like to throw out one of our polls.
I got two here to just try to get a sense of what you folks
who are out there are about.
I assume Bruce, you will pull these up as I tell you.
So I have one for those of you who are formal educators and
one for those of you who are informal educators.
I didn't quite have room in the poll to say this,
does this apply to me so if you're a formal educator,
just keep quiet while we do the informal one and vice versa.
So if the categories don't exactly fit you,
if they are some things kind of close to give me an idea,
that would be great.
I'm sure I missed some of you.
So Bruce, if we could maybe do the informal educators poll
first?
>> You got it Randy.
And by the way, those of you who may be viewing this on an
ipad or other mobile device from Apple,
I think Apple does not pull up quite as well for you,
but please enter your votes now,
those of you that can see those polls,
We will keep it up for just a bit.
Okay, that looks about right.
I'm just going to g everybody about another second
to make a decision and we'll close the poll.
And now, share it.
So now, Randy, can you see the results in front of you?
>> I can.
I'll move over to my m screen to make sure everybody
else can see them.
So it looks like close to half of f the folks whose identify
as informal educators either work for some sort of
Government agency or lab or some sort of NGO or probably
other nonprofits, a fair amount
of folks from nature centers, aquariums and a decent number
from museums, after-school programs and scouts.
So great, thanks for giving me some idea of who's out there in
Internet land so I have a little bit better of a sense of
how to steer this.
If we can go ahead and do the formal educators poll.
If you're not a formal educator or I didn't quite capture
accurately, what grade level but basically try to guess of
what age level of students that you work with.
>> Very good, our polls are open now.
Okay.
Everybody should be seeing now for results of the poll.
>> Okay, so it looks like quite a few college level folks or at
least community college levels, a fair number of high schools
and a decent number of elementary so a little bit
across the board as I would expect and thanks folks for
giving me a sense of who's what.
I think as I'm not surprised, I probably have the to make this
a fairly general presentation that tries to appeal to a broad
range of audiences and I'll try to do that.
All right, so the first p that I will talk you through is
basically called earth energy balance,
a number of other groups and books sort of address this
issue as an early -- I don't know,
first level of thinking about earth climate.
And the basic idea is that if you got a planet lit up by a
star, based on a few key simple things,
you can calculate about what the temperature of that will be
expected to be.
This has
become particularly interesting in the last oh, 15,
20 years as we started discovering a lot of planets
around other stars to well,
which ones are in that Goldie Lock zone and that sort of
sweet spot, the habitable zone where they could have liquid
water.
Or it's not too hot that they would be boiling.
And it's not so cold that it be frozen.
That there is a decent chance that there might be life.
So that's what this will address.
I will sort of walk you through how a model like this works and
show you it.
And it's mainly educational, a lead-in to why the greenhouse
effect is important, why having some amount of greenhouse gases
in our atmosphere are a very good thing from the perspective
of things living on our planet.
But then, as a lead-in to why too much greenhouse gases are
not such a good thing.
I think I got a little bit ahead of myself there.
This slide kind of summarizes some of the things that I just
said, basically the end result will be we discover earth will
be pretty darn cold without a greenhouse atmosphere.
The kind of math that we are doing is pretty much just
algebra and straightforward geometry.
For those of you not interested or comfortable with the math,
please play attention to sort of logic of the argument it I
put this math on the screen so that it's available for those
of you that do want to get into it.
But for those of you that a not so keen,
please sort of ignore it.
Our physicists in the audience, we got some of
the topics covered here or how a black body radiator works or
which relates how warm something the with how much
energy it gives up.
We will talk about conservation of energy and the concepts of
albedo.
And let's see, actually, I'm reminding myself that at this
point, since probably most of the people should be in the
door by now, to just jump out of the point for a second and
show you on our website and this address,
I believe Bruce has posted on their site and maybe can slap
into the chat message window, everything that I'm showing
here tonight is posted on the links are posted on the web
page.
So it's done sort of a one stop shopping page.
So anything I show here will be listed on this web page.
So with that URL, if you want to look at any of these things
later, go there, click around and you should be able to find
everything I have shown.
Go ahead -- and while I'm over here,
while this is talking about the math or the calculating energy
balance, for those of you who really want the math,
there is a page which linked from that one I was just
showing, that goes into quite a bit of detail,
has some diagrams as examples of the algebra behind the math
and some worked out examples where I plugged in numbers.
So for those of you that want to do the math of this and have
your students run through it, it is middle school level
accessible and it's pretty well documented there.
So if you want that, i available.
I'm not going
to go into much detail during the power point because I'm
sure some people aren't so interested in that but it's
there if you want it.
Let me get back to the power point now and,
start walking through this, get it on the screen.
There we go.
Okay.
Let's see, just talk through that and the math is the
available.
I got ahead of myself a little bit but on to the next slide.
So the basic idea here is that with an isolated system like
the earth kind of is in space, any sort of system like that
conservation of energy basically says the amounts of
the energy coming into the system and the amount of energy
going out has to be balanced if you let the system sit along
and reach its delivery for a while.
So the energy coming to e is primarily.
From the sun.
The vast majority of it c from the sun,
no surprise there.
And we can -- this diagram is sort of showing you that we can
simplify this further, that it's basically how much energy
the earth intercepts and instead of treating earth as as
sphere as it is shown continue bottom diagram,
we can actually simplify it to treat earth as a disk or like a
circle as is shown in the upper diagram because they both
intercept the same amount of sunlight and that makes our
calculations similar.
Basically, we know v satellite and it was predicted
before we had satellite with reasonable accuracy that the
amount of energy coming from the sun at earth's distance
from the sun
before it gets into the atmosphere and gets scattered
around and absorbed some is about 1,
3060 Watts per square meter.
So if you have about 14 1 watt bulbs and shown that many
bulbs on each square meter area,
that's the level of sunlight we're getting.
So then, all we got to do is say, well,
what's the area that intercepting,
how many square meters are there that we have to multiply
that 1400 watts or 13061 watts per square meter time to get
this total?
So basically the area of the circle,
the size of the earth so the case of S sphere where is that
constant, that 13061 watts per square meter.
And probably all of you remember that the area of the
circle is high square so R E some add as of the it will hair
so again, some fairly simple middle school at best level
sort of algebra and geometry.
So we will look at the energy coming in and then,
we got to figure out how much energy is going out.
We almost set those two e and then kind of solve that to
see what temperature correspondence to.
There is one extra piece in here if you ever look at some
of those images from earth and space,
you can see that the ice around the Antarctica looks white and
clouds places look white and some other things reflect some
of the sunlight away.
So we have to subtract out the sunlight that just comes in,
bounce off something white or light-colored and it goes away
because that does not contribute to heating.
That goes back out into space.
The
reason we can see the polar caps looking whites from orbit
is because those boutons of light are bouncing right back
out and not contributing to the temperature of the earth,
the heating of the surface of the earth.
So in this slide, when o minus albedo portion is
accounting for that so we got the same equation from the
previous slide but we just thrown in this one minus albedo
part.
Albedo for those of you w aren't familiar is basically a
measure of lightness or reflectivity.
So a substance such as snow or really,
light covered surface have albedo of 80 or 90
percent, something like asphalt or other really dark surfaces
might have an albedo closer to ten percent.
In some -- in astronomy they usually talk about albedo
ranging from zero to one so it is a percent of snow.
9 and asphalt is .
1.
In the earth side, they usually refer to it as percent but it's
the same idea.
And it turns out that the average albedo over all of the
earth taking all of that snow and dark forest and everything
combined is about 30, 31 percent.
So now, that's giving us what we need to know about the
energy coming in and again, taking this back to the notion
of modeling, we're basically in models trying to figure out
equations that represent the natural behaviors of systems,
combine them in the ways that represent the physics
accurately but come out telling us about the importance of
science topics.
So that's where we're going in terms of
modeling.
There is a simple model pf planet and temperature.
So figuring out that energy going back out and.
I imagine most of you know that any object that's got a
temperature above absolute zero is giving off some amount of
radiation, usually in the form of heat as infrared.
So even things that are 100 below zero on the Fahrenheit
scale are still well above absolute zero and giving off
heat even though they seem very cold to us.
So anything that's not incredibly, incredibly,
incredibly cold is giving up some of this infrared
radiation.
A couple of different physicists and I'm trying to
remember the year.
I forget whether it was sometime in the 1700s or the
18oos but two different physicists in Europe came upon
a relationship for how the energy based on temperature
goes.
One of them did it and so it's called the Stephen Bolt Law
after this two fellows that's their last names.
One of them did it in m theoretical view point and kind
of calculated what the Physicist said it should be.
The other one did it more experimentally by heating up
things in the lab and measuring the energy coming off of them.
And they got pretty much the same results.
The equation down below here is representing this and the Jay
Star is just the normal representation that they use.
I don't know why they picked exactly those characters,
but that's what's commonly used for the energy coming off.
So the red arrow is coming away from earth and this diagram is
what that is
representing.
Sigma is the constant so it is something like the speed of
light or something like that.
It's just through observation we notice that that's what the
constant.
But the key thing is that it depends on temperature to the
fourth power.
Something to the fourth power grows really quickly as
temperatures goes up.
That's what that graph on t right is indicating.
So if we do temperatures in an absolute scale where zero is at
the absolute zero so the Kelvins Scale is one that's
based on Celtics and has the same size degree instead zero
being the freezing point of water, it's at absolute zero.
If you plot it there, you get this nice curve which shows
that as the temperature increases,
the amount of radiation coming off goes up by a lot.
So, that's what going to tell us how much energy is coming
away from the earth.
And we have to take that times the surface area just like with
the incoming light, we have to say how many watts per square
meter coming in and how many total square meters does earth
have.
We're doing the same thing here again.
We can't take the shortcut that we did before of saying, well,
it's just as though earth was a circle that makes our
calculation easier because it really is all the energy coming
from going out where in all directions from the sphere.
So we have to take the area of the sphere.
So the surface area of t sphere which you may not
remember, I had to look up is 4PR square unlike the PR square
per circle, so not that much tricker.
So basically what we've done is one value tells us how much
energy per square meter.
The other one tells us how many square meters and that's how
much energy is being emitted.
So the trick then is to equate the energy in with the energy
out assuming the diagram on the left.
So we got the energy absorbed which was that area of the
circle times the 14 lightbulbs minus the albedo effect.
So we put that on the left side and then the energy emitted
which we just talked through from the infrared going outward
on the right.
And the pie and the R or the PR square is on both sides so that
cancels out.
We got a fairly simple equation that we can do some algebra and
rearrange and basically come up with a value for temperature of
what it should be for a planet distance from a star with this
brightness and a planet with a certain albedo.
So case of S is a constant albedo is a known number that
we can measure.
The sigma down here is a constant.
So all of this can b calculated by just plugging in
some numbers.
Again for those of you not interested in math,
ignore the stuff up at the top that's plugging in some of
those numbers and turning crank.
The bottom line here is the temperature through this
calculation for the surface of the earth works out to about
minus 20-degrees Celsius which is about minus 3 degrees
Fahrenheit.
In other words, well below the freezing point of water at 32
degrees Fahrenheit or zero Celsius.
In
other words, most of the earth would be frozen over.
There might be a narrow band at the equator where it's a little
bit warmer but on average, the surface temperature of the
earth would be well below zero.
That's the bottom line and the intro into the notion of why
the greenhouse effect is important and why a certain
amount of it is key for having life on earth.
I'll do a quick demo now of what the software looks like
and as soon as I figure out where my windows are.
Here we go.
So the idea here is that I initially -- when you open this
up, have the albedo set at 50 percent sort of the middle
given that you may or may not want your students to know
right off the bat what it is for earth.
You may want to have them play around with it.
But basically I can move this slider over on the right and
drag it down to the point where it's 31 degrees.
And if you'll note, t thermometer over on the right
changes as ichange the albedo.
If I make our planet r bright,
it's reflecting away most of that light and the temperature
goes down because it's not absorbing very much sunlight.
If I make the planet really, really dark,
the temperature goes up because most of the sunlight gets
absorbed and feeds the planet.
We can also pick a surface so this menu down below that you
say, huh, I wonder what it would be like if the entire
earth was covered by sea ice and it automatically plugs in
the appropriate albedo and shows you what the temperature
would be, and we can even make a planet that's completely
covered by asphalt and see what that would look like.
And again, it's going to be a bit warmer because it's so
dark.
You can switch the temperature scale here so if you're used to
working in English units or your kids are more familiar
with that, ypu can do that.
If you want to work in the Kelvin Scale where we're
actually doing the calculation you can do that.
The albedo values, there is a little help pop up thing here
that explains that all of these are arranged depending on how
you measure them and what exactly kind of snow we're
talking about.
So it gives a bit more detail on some of those albedo values
that you can pick through the menu.
Also, I won't go into this much but if any of you are familiar
with the idea that faint Young Sun Paradox,
the notion that our sun was not as bright early on in its
history, you can come over here and change the brightness of
the sun to put it at about 70 percent of current brightness
level that was believed early in the history of the solar
system and given the -- with a less bright sun,
it's even harder to put the albedo back to modern day sort
of values.
We now have minus 40 Celsiuses so it's even colder,
not surprising.
And again, for those of you that want to see the math,
with high math button down here,
you turn that on as I play around with the albedo values,
you can see the equations updating as we go.
And if I play around with
the brightness of the un, the same sort of idea.
So depending on what you want your students to be doing and
what level sophistication you want them to focus on,
you can just look at sort of the thermometer and the
graphics of the sun getting brighter and the albedo
changing, the appearance of the planet looking a bit brighter,
the albedo high looking a bit darker.
But if you really ant to help scaffold them into thinking
about the math, you can show that.
Okay.
Let me pop back over to power point now.
Just so most ment here while I flail around and get my power
point.
There we go.
And I should mention, there are some other groups who have
taken on the same topic.
It is a fairly common one, sort of an introduction to climate
science kind of notion.
There is one that a group at NASA had done that does decent
spreadsheets.
If you wanted your students to build up a spreadsheet from
scratch as well and really understand the math,
you can do that.
This would give you a m how to do that.
If you want a pre-populated spreadsheet for them for them
to play with, that's out there.
And the web page that I showed you near the beginning about
this stuff explains that in some more detail and where to
find that.
There is also another group that's done a version of this
that's got a kind of cool feature on this panel in the
upper right.
It shows that instead of just setting a global albedo value
of this, that or the other, you can use a paint tool to sort of
paint on a climate surface of what you might want your
hypothetical planet to look like or you can paint even a
crude earth on there and sort of see how that impacts albedo.
I won't go into any detail on that but there are a couple of
clever sort of things.
That second one also has the capacity to move this planet
closer and further away from the sun,
so you can see what a earth-like planet at the
distance of Mars might be like or the distance of Venus,
what kind of a situation you would have there.
Okay I'm going to jump into the next topic.
Now and give myself a little bit of a time check here and
see that I better move along a little.
So, this one is a sort of board game like activity so it's
hands on moving beads around on some different sort of playing
boards to illustrate how both the greenhouse effect works and
how the atmosphere has different layers with different
temperatures.
Again, this is from another group.
We just sort of done some extensions around it but there
is a group at the Colorado State University in the
northern part of Colorado here called The Little Shop of
Physics that originally came up with this idea.
We really like it and l playing with it as a sort of
hands on way to get at how models work and the kind of
results you get from them.
Let's see, so the basic idea, you have a bunch of these chips
shown in the image as sort of red dots scattered around
boards.
The chips kind of represent temperature and kind
of represent heat apology to those physicists in the
audience who struggle keeping those two ideas separate with
their students.
I realize there is a little bit of a challenge and
misconception they sometimes have that temperature and heat
are more or less the same thing.
That's the way they did it in this model.
There are basically three man boards.
One on the left representing the surface one,
one more towards the middle representing a lower part of
the atmosphere, sort of lower troposphere and another one
more toward the right representing the upper part of
the atmosphere.
And in this case, the upper atmosphere is really matching
the upper part of the troposphere.
We're not really getting into the high parts of the
atmosphere here.
And then another board that kind of represents the sun and
kind of represents space.
So it's either where the energy is coming in from and going
out.
As a model, this uses the physics of the system to sort
of establish what the rules are,
how you move the chips around.
And it also kind of illustrates as you play this game or run
through the simulation, several aspects of how models work is
an idea of spinning off a model of sort of initializing it and
getting it going to make equilibrium state.
There is a notion of equilibrium in systems both --
and we'll talk about this a bit of both static equilibrium and
dynamic equilibrium.
They jump right into that.
This is basically and I'm sure all of
you have seen diagrams like this.
The one in the upper portion is kind of showing the greenhouse
effect in sort of two separate frames with yellow sun-like
energy coming in and by and large going right through the
atmosphere to the surface, a little bit of it gets reflected
back out into space or the bulk of it makes it to the surface.
And then the upper right panel is showing how the infrared
long wave radiation try to get out because of the greenhouse
gases.
A lot of it gets absorbed, sent back to the surface and has to
cycle a bit before it makes its way out.
The lower panel is just another example of a greenhouse effect
diagram that is kind of showing it all in one diagram.
But I'm sure you have seen things like this and this is
basically what this simulation illustrates.
So there are these various sheets representing the earth's
surface and the two layers of the atmosphere.
The squares on the sheets basically represent
temperature.
You fill them with the red dots going from the bottom upwards
so the more of them there are, the higher the temperature of
that part of that system.
And I don't think when they made this up,
they were necessarily thinking that they corresponded to any
particular temperature scale.
They do work out to be pretty close to what values you would
have during the Celsius scale.
So, I guess this is back to that, all models are wrong,
some are useful.
It is not perfectly there but kind of in that neighborhood.
Anyhow, a
number of chips that you have in each of these regions piling
them up from the bottom first represents temperature.
And then, getting back to that Stefan Boltzmann Law,
depending on hot the surface is,
if it's relatively cool and the chips lie in the bottom
section, the bottom 8 squares, if the highest temperature is
only in that region, then you only transfer two chips out.
As you fill up further up the diagram,
you get to the point where if it's hotter and hotter,
you will be transferring six chips or 7 chips away because,
well, that temperature to the fourth relationship is kicking
in and and more and more chips get sent out, radiated away.
More heat is radiated off, the temperature is higher off if
the temperature is higher.
So here's what it sort of looks like.
This is a photograph of a of it showing the initial
stage.
So here we have 19 chips is what the authors of the
activity recommend that you start with.
And you see how that plays out so you pile a bunch of them on
there, read off -- it's not quite visible here but at this
level with 19 chips, the value next to it says transfer four
chips.
So we will be moving some of those away and that's kind of
how that simulation runs.
So to start with, you initialize the model and that's
what they do with real climate and weather models is they set
up an initial state.
So in this case, they recommend that you start with a
temperature of 19 for surface on the left,
a temperature of 19 for the lower
atmosphere and 19 chips on it.
And a somewhat cooler upper atmosphere with 8 chips on it.
Now, the rules should make it so that if those values are
wrong, if we run the model for a while,
it should adjust itself automatically.
And this is the notion of spinning up a model.
They do this with climate models of running them through
a simulated 10 or 20 or years before they actually say,
okay, now what happens if increase greenhouse gases or
something because they need to make sure their initial
assumptions about the model are realistic in terms of the
actual physics of the model.
This is known as spinning up a model.
Key concept here as I mentioned before,
the chips on the sun coming in as visible light by and large
go right through the atmosphere straight to the earth's
surface.
So this yellow arrow with the red ellipse around it is where
we are going to move chips from the sun as we're working them
toward earth.
So that's why they pretty much skip by the upper and lower
atmosphere straight to the surface because the earth's
atmosphere is largely transparent for visible light.
Once it gets down to t surface and heats it up and we
start having that radiation coming back off as infrared,
we don't have the case that it passes right through because of
e greenhouse gases, it gets stopped.
So the infrared coming from the surface makes it to the lower
atmosphere but gets absorbed there and it takes a few stages
to get its way out.
Likewise, the lower
atmosphere because it's warm, also radiates in the infrared
and it radiates some of that heat back down to earth and
some of it to the upper atmosphere.
I don't have a diagram for this but the same sort of thing is
going on in the upper atmosphere.
So that's basically how the model works and the elements to
it.
Each turn in the model has sort of two phases.
So if we start with the setup shown before we had
temperatures of 19 surface lower atmosphere,
and then a temperature of 8 in the upper atmosphere,
each pf those temperature ranges tells us to radiate a
certain number of chips away.
So in the radiate phase, we look at those numbers.
We say, un-huh, we should move three chips from the sun to the
earth's surface.
But then we got four chips coming off of the earth's
surface because of what the temperature reading says there.
We got some chips coming from the lower atmosphere down to
the surface.
We got some chips going from the lower atmosphere to the
upper atmosphere.
Same sort of deal with the upper atmosphere and its
radiating some of it out into space.
So then, we have a second phase to each turn where we then say,
okay, the arrow says move these chips to here,
move those chips to there.
And so we have an absorption phase.
So every step in running the model has these two phases.
And this is also a common sort of thing that computer models
sort of breakdown every little time step into some different
processes.
They may run them
at the same time because the computer can keep track of all
those in its head as it were.
We got some arrows and things to sort of keep track of that
for us.
So if we do both of t phases and we take one step in
the model, one time step, we go from this condition of 19 at
the surface, 19 in the lower atmosphere,
8 in the upper atmosphere, to a point where we got two more
chips now at earth's surface so it's warmed up a little.
The lower atmosphere has actually cooled down a little,
gone from that 19 down to 18.
And the upper atmosphere has warmed slightly.
We have to run this model a number of time steps before we
get to an equilibrium.
I'm not going to step you through that power point one at
a time.
I'm going to pull up a time lapse movie that I have done of
this and sort of step you slowly through this.
So let me grab that.
Let's see if I can make it screen here.
There we go, close much.
And I'm actually going to step through this with my arrow key
and see if pick get this to stop showing the menu bar,
maybe not but if you wasn't the surface,
I will just use the arrow key to kind of slowly go through
this.
You can see that the surface starts warming up.
Ultimately in the middle in the top shows the time step.
And if we keep running this, you will see that the surface
warms up, the lower atmosphere is gradually warming although
it's doing it in fits starts.
The surface is sort of stalled out a little bit so the lower
atmosphere gets warm enough.
The upper
atmosphere is gradually warming as well.
And I'm just going to r through this.
You will note if you look carefully,
that I've kind of gone off the chart on the earth surface
level.
The originators of this d expect me to use this model
this way so I kind of had extrapolate what would happen
there because it went a little higher,
the temperature that they were expecting their model runs.
But basically what happens is if you keep doing this until
after a certain point, this stops adjusting.
So while they are going up and down,
but eventually and I think it's a time step 3, yup,
we hit an equilibrium that says transfer 3 chips out from space
to the upper atmosphere.
If you recall, we have 3 chips coming in from the sun every
turn and the balance of two things out,
that's when we hit equilibrium.
So this model has shown us how we eventually get to a static
equilibrium sort of state where every turn,
three chips are coming in and in return 3 chips are going out
and nothing is really changing any more.
That was the spin up o model.
And I can see I'm getting tight enough on time that I may have
to skim through a couple of things here.
Let me see, it's way b there.
Can I kind of get myself to the power point?
Just a second.
There we are, somewhere near here.
Escape out of that.
Let's try that again.
I'm going to have to arrow key through these quickly to get
back to where I was.
There you go.
So this is what it looks like if you actually
graph what happened.
The surface warms up, that's the brown line at the top.
The lower atmosphere warms up but not quite as much.
The upper atmosphere warms up but not quite as much.
And then at the end here the all sort of flat line because
they reached the equilibrium, well,
what's wrong with this model.
The main thing is the sun is always on and we don't have any
day or night cycle.
You can play around with this so that you have it go three
turns of daylight and then three turns at night.
And in the night phase, we don't have any new incoming in
the red box down here in the yellow spaced earth.
So during the day, we h those 3 chips coming in.
At night, we don't.
But we still have all the radiation going on between the
different areas because they still have that temperature.
And I'm not going to go into any details on that but
basically what happens is that you again,
you spin up the model, you eventually reach equilibrium
but it's the dynamic equilibrium.
It's a state where the temperature is going up and
down, and up and down but it's going to be a repeating
pattern.
So here is a graph that looks like also a time lapse movie
that I will skip over that shows that happening,
but that you can watch on your own.
It's available on the web site.
So basically, this is again, a notion that's common in
modeling.
If you image climate m they are not going to hit a
certain temperature and stick there because we
have seasons.
In the winter it gets cooler.
Well, it depends on which hemisphere you're in and so
forth like that.
But you have these states where they get to a balance and they
can be a static balance where everything is staying the same
but they can also be sort of repeating cycle pattern.
I'll mention quickly that there is a whole lot of extensions.
You can take a look at the power point after the webinar
to see when some of them are.
They do have an option to have an enhanced greenhouse effect
so both the lower and upper atmosphere sheets have a
version of how many chips you should transfer even you have
lower amounts of greenhouse gases and then a slightly
higher number of chips that you should transfer if you have an
enhanced greenhouse effect.
And, anyhow there is a bunch of things you can play with.
You can play with different seasons of different lengths,
nights and days.
You can try a one l atmosphere,
a 3 layer atmosphere.
You can do brighter, light to noon and then morning and late
afternoon and so forth.
Okay.
Let's see.
We will do the abbreviated version of this.
The third and final main topic that I'll mention here is the
very, very simple climate model.
So the idea with this o again, again,
another computer-based interactive coming back from
the physical manipulative kind of rolled back onto the
computer.
And the idea is that you can play with what if scenarios.
If humans decide to do this, that
or the other with our fossil fuel emissions,
with our adoption of renewable energies that are not
greenhouse gas emitting energy sources,
if we do more with conservation,
what happen to the global temperature?
There is a fairly straightforward relationship
that if you put CO2 into the atmosphere,
you can calculate how much CO2 you end up with in the
atmosphere, the 400 parts per million that you probably heard
of that were hovering around these days,
sort of that atmospheric concentration in the middle.
And then based on that, even though the fancy high level
climate models require a lot of details about all kinds of
things that really get it right,
there is a real rough calculation that basically says
if you double this amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,
the temperature goes up 3 degrees.
If you can again, do the kind of math that's accessible to
middle school students, the basic algebra skills to do this
kind of calculation.
Again, we've got that documented online.
Here is kind of a graphical showing that if you double the
amount of CO2, the temperature goes up by 3-degrees.
I'm going to skip through this math but we do have that
available on the website for those of you that want to dig
into that.
I think I'm gong to skip the poll about this but just --
this is the basic question that we're posing,
if through this simulation is that on the left,
we've got a graph showing emissions.
Currently, we're on
the order of ten gigatons of carbon being emitted per year
worldwide.
And the growth trend of that has been such that about every
decade that goes up by one.
So another ten years, we'd effect it to be about 11.
Twenty years ago, it w somewhere on the order of 8.
So as we decrease the amount of emissions,
it's probably pretty straightforward to note that
the amount in the atmosphere which is what the graph on the
right are saying it's not going to level off.
It's not going to go down.
So B and C are not really what's going to happen.
It's just going to keep going up.
What's less and since the temperature is tied to the
amount of CO2 in atmosphere,
the amount of greenhouse effect,
the temperature is also going to rise.
So if emissions rise, t temperature is going to rise.
So the answer here as it w is A.
What's not quite so c skipping that sort of one link
in it just sort of equating the emissions to the temperature,
is this -- let's say in 2050 or so,
worldwide emissions level off which is what we're trying to
get to as a first step.
What's going to happen?
Is the temperature going to continue to rise?
Is the temperature going to level off?
Is it going to go down?
That is probably not intuitively obvious to most of
your students.
And then, another case, say by the middle of the century,
we get pretty aggressive with cutting back on emissions and
we start lowering them.
Again, it's probably not intuitively obvious with it.
The temperature would continue to rise or it would flatten off
or it would decrease.
And that's the main point of this model is to be able to
play around with scenarios like that.
I think in the interest o time,
there's numbers here in this power point.
Take a look if you want later, but I'm going to skip ahead a
little and just get to -- oh, I will briefly mention that we
got a web page that kind of illustrates -- I don't know
whether you can see the dots here but they are basically a
big blue rectangle that represents in terms of this
area the total gases in the atmosphere.
And there is a bunch of black dots scattered around this to
represent what 400 parts per million carbon dioxide looks
like.
If that's not visible on this screen,
the next one shows them all brought together in the middle
to illustrate that that's not really that much carbon
dioxide.
And then a third graphic shows the other gases in the
atmosphere oxygen at 21 percent,
nitrogen is 78 percent.
And the other things.
Again on our web page on this if you're interested in using
these, they are available line.
Okay, I'll do a quick demo of this and then I better get
moving towards my final couple of things to be able to keep
this more or less on time.
So here is the very simple climate model.
So what you can control as the input is the CO2 emission rate
so the stuff coming out of the smoke stacks,
coming out car exhausts, coming from cement production, from
rice patties, all kinds of things.
This actually is kind o accumulated all greenhouse
gases, not just CO2, the methane from rice patties and
so forth, the grafting here but it's mostly fossil fuel
burning.
So here, we run the values up to present day where we're on
the order of ten gigatons per year.
So I can use this slider and say, well, let's see,
in another five years since it's been going up by about a
gigaton per second, I'll move it up to 11.
I'll hit the step forward button and add a point on the
graph.
And if you can sort of precisely control it and sort
of work your way through that way or if there is a model
where I can just start playing it and move the slider and add
points on the slide, so I'll do that.
And I'll sort of just k gradually adding stuff kind of
keeping that line at about the slow growth of the businesses
usual assuming we aren't really making any changes going
forward.
And we're almost out here to 2100.
And so now, you can look at corresponding atmospheric CO2
concentration so you can at least check boxes in the lower
left.
And I can see that oh, b somewhere around 2020,
by the late part of the century,
we've exceed 600 parts per million.
By the tail end of the century, the scenario puts Us at about
700 parts per million.
And that gives us a temperature rise -- well,
a little bit off the graph.
We can change the scale on the graph, in order to make it fit.
We can also show the
recommended 2-degrees of warming and see that by
somewhere around 2060, we've exceeded that value of two
degrees of warming that we're trying to shoot for that
scientists are recommending that we shoot for.
So let me start over, get back to CO2 emissions rate and I'll
leave it as an exercise for the viewer to play around with,
what this looks like for the flattening off of this
mid-century level.
And I'll just give us an example of what it looks like
to have it go up for a while, and then start declining pretty
rapidly assuming that we really did a lot to convert to
renewables to conserve energy, to do various things that bring
our emissions down quite a bit.
And we can look at the CO2 concentration.
Now, we've got it so that it's making it to about 600 parts
per million by the end of the century.
And the temperature, w we're maybe a degree or so
above, so we've helped matters but it's still going up.
And that might be the puzzling thing is to see that the
emissions are going down the temperature is still going
up.
And that's the kind of the key point of this simulation.
If any of you -- I think I'll have to be kind of quick about
this are familiar with the notion of the carbon bathtub,
it is an analogy where we treat the water in the bathtub as
though it's the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Before students came along, there's about the same going in
every year.
Coming out, we've got a n of animations.
Let's
see that show.
>> Let's see how quickly it goes.
That shows that we're putting more water as it were in the
bathtub or CO2 into the atmosphere.
Guess what, the bathtub fills up.
And then, the key point is that if we turn back that faucet,
we are still going to be pumping in more than going out
until we turn it back a lot.
And so we got an example of this animation that follows
along with the kind of trajectory I just showed you in
the simple climate model showing that as we turn the
faucet up, the level in the bathtub rises really quickly.
If we turn it back, it's still not down to that initial
trickle.
We're still going to be adding water to the bathtub,
we're still going to be adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
I'll do a couple of things here and wrap it up.
Make sure there is nothing that's critical that I missed
here.
I think that's good enough.
I'll make a very quick illusion to a couple of other things.
Let me find the appropriate web pages here.
I think I mentioned at the beginning,
we done a collection of a lot of games and simulations from
other sources.
I have been interested in this topic for a while.
I stumbled on things, seeing things at conferences.
There is a lot of good stuff out there so I've been doing a
collection of just various atmospheric science related
games and simulations.
Many of them are climate related.
I'll just sort of quickly scroll down through this page
to give you a sense.
Each listing has a little thumbnail image that might help
you quickly assess whether there are sort of cartoons
oriented for younger kids or much more graphical and
sophisticated that might fit with older students.
And there is a broad range of these things.
Some of these items a individual games, simulations.
Many of them are collections.
This is a Nebraska project that I think has oh,
20 or 30 or so simulation groups has literally hundreds
of simulations and probably at least a dozen or so that's
related to earth science atmospheric topics.
So I recommend you take a look at that because there is
probably at least some things that are obscure that you never
heard of that you might find useful there.
I'll make a quick mention that we got for those of you who
deal with things paleoclimate and the proxies
for that, let's see, so we got a tree ring simulator.
We are working on a ice core one.
So the idea is that you t match this tree ring sample by
saying, let's add a ring of growth.
Oh, it looks like I matched it there.
Let's add another ring and no, that one's too small.
Let me take that off.
Let me try a slightly warmer temperature to see if that gets
a match.
Oh, sure, enough, it does.
And so you gradually build up a tree ring,
try to basically decode what the ring is telling you about
the climate of the past.
And this graphic at the b then shows you basically what
you're decoding as shown
that I was dry for several years.
The temperature was warm for a period and that's why we get
certain tree rings.
Because the idea of the different layers of the
atmosphere came up, to the Little Shop of Physics
Simulation, I'll just quickly mention that we got a virtual
ballooning activity where you launch balloons to learn about
the structure of the atmosphere.
So there we have some of the initial settings that show us
that at first, as you go up through the atmosphere,
the temperature gets cooler but you can play around with where
you're taking measurements of how often and launch more
flights and kind of learn that eventually,
as we get up into the stratosphere,
the atmosphere starts getting warmer and that's a key idea
for the -- why they call it different layers of the
atmosphere.
It also has a portion where you can look at the atmosphere
pressure and so forth.
So instead of looking a diagram about the temperature
structure, the atmosphere is playing around with it.
And I'll also quickly mention that we have done a series of
lessons around the greenhouse effect, again,
using some simulations from other groups.
If you're familiar with the Fetch or you're if you're
familiar with the Concord Consortium,
both of them make some really nice computer-based
interactions.
We've drawn up some lesson plans around those activities
or those inter-actives from those groups with some
assessment questions and some sort of the a five need style
lessons to guide you through using those to explain about
the greenhouse effect.
Let me see if -- maybe one more slide -- no,
that one I will not get to.
So I think in the interest o time,
I better call it a day and turn it back over to Bruce.
I assume we may do some Q and A and I'll let him guide us on
where we're headed next.
>> Thanks Randy, really, really appreciate your guiding us
through that range of simulations both online as well
as hands-on manipulatives.
One thing I certainly would like to know is for that
hands-on model that you demonstrated,
I'm assuming that's going to be available to download for folks
off of that site?
>> Yeah, so that web page, I guess I'll pull it back up if
I'm still screen sharing here.
So the page that I put together with links to everything I have
shown here -- let's see, I think the third main bullet
point down here, I'll go-ahead to that,
because I have added videos and stuff as sort of
extensions to this, this points to the original activity
which is a PDF from the Little Shop of Physics that gives the
background, step-by-step instructions and then as well,
a student instruction sheet and then the various boards that
are part of it.
So all of that stuff is available currently online as
linked from the web URL that I shared,
as well as the different movies that I showed.
One of them I alluded to the other ones.
And I added in the
arrow sheets that sort of go in between the different boards to
help make it clearer.
So all that stuff is currently available on line.
>> Thanks.
Well, I'll tell you what, I'm actually going to show just
some information that I have for everyone regarding some
additional resources.
In the meantime if anybody has any questions,
why don't you type those in and we will get right back to those
for Randy.
So, these are some of the additional resources that we
mentioned.
Here is the link to that page that he mentioned.
Also, there is a excellent page on climate modeling resources
from Dr. Court Strong from the University of Utah talking
about atmospheric sciences.
He put those together and for those of you who may be serious
with the earth exploration tool book,
there is an excellent there on the emission of
climate change using a global climate model.
And just another quick announcement just to remind
everyone that please go to your e-mail now.
You got a link to our post and our poll.
We appreciate if you can respond to it right after this
broadcast.
Also, January 25th at 8:00 p.m.
eastern time is going to be our next climate steward book club
discussion, the topic being Children's Trade Book on
Climate.
And the main book for discussion is going to be the
Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge.
I'd like to give the screen back over to Randy while we
take some of these questions over here now.
So Randy, you have the screen
back.
One question that we have: In playing with the simple climate
model, does not seem to take into account lag time necessary
to assist the equilibrium?
Have you found that too much of a high level concept?
Or can you speak to that?
Thanks.
>> So yeah, that is actually an excellent question.
I'll for the moment lean on "all models are wrong,
some models are useful." But no,
that is the next thing that I intend to add to it.
There are a number of features that I haven't yet implemented
in the very, very simple climate model.
I think taking one of those varies off and making it just
the very simple climate model, the next step is to add in
basically the ocean because what's really going on right
now is that most of the greenhouse effect,
as soon as it warms the atmosphere,
that warming goes into the ocean.
The water in the ocean is this huge heat sink so atmospheric
temperatures don't go up nearly as quickly as this model
portrays because it doesn't have a lag time associated with
that ocean absorption of heat.
It's not too complicated to put in the model.
I think it's probably a good idea to have sort of a level
one of the model, not including that but I think that's such a
big factor in how things really work and why the temperature
has not gone up more already, but why we know it's going to
be going up in the future.
So that's number one on my list.
Let me see, do you have the simple carbon model?
I'll just
mention that there is a certain amount of -- or there is a
change setting button in the lower corner here that
currently allows you to monkey around with the client
sensitivity.
I'll note that I do have it accurately not keeping all the
carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere in the
atmosphere.
About half of it gets either absorbed by plants or absorbed
by the ocean.
So you can play around w that and some other factors and
definitely high, high on my list on the next thing to do
with this is to add a lag associated with the ocean.
I think it's a pretty key thing to making this a more
reasonable representative model that gets pretty close to the
real situation.
The current model without that lag time I think is a little
bit of a misnomer because simply I think it is a key
thing to leave out.
So thanks for reinforcing the fact that I should get to that
soon.
>> Thanks Randy.
You know, another one was to ask whether or not in the
instructional plan, whether or not you correlate to NGSS or
the CCSS which in Language Arts or math and perhaps if you
don't currently, are there plans to do so?
>> Yeah, so we got all of our activities right up online,
cite standards but they cited the old science education
standards, the version prior to the NGSS.
We are in the process of redoing those to align to NGSS.
We will see to what extent we can manage the common core,
particularly math
ones and I know one of my colleagues here is pretty gon
hoe about literacy elements.
So we will be working on that.
We are pretty thinly staffed so I can't pretend that we're
necessarily going to get to that real soon.
Again, it's a work in progress and I think we're going to be
picking certain of our items that we think are more popular
and doing those first and this ranks up there.
So, we will get to that.
Again I'm not sure how soon.
Certainly NGSS alignment with regards to common core are not
quite as certain about that.
>> Okay, well, thanks so much Randy and really appreciate
your time this evening helping and offering us this webinar.
Certainly, we will be sending out your bio and providing
other folks with- providing other folks with your
information your content information of course to those
sites and certainly, we really do encourage you to -- everyone
who's been here to go to the U/Car site and check out some
of the wonderful work that Randy and many others have done
and to join us again next month for our next installment of the
NOAA Climate Steward Education project webinar.
And with that, I'm going to leave you with this model,
Ocean Simulation of Sea Shore Temperature where we can really
see a pretty strong El Nino and wish everyone a goodnight.
Thanks so much.