Climate Systems and Climate Dynamics: Biogeochemistry

Earth's history is marked by episodes of large-scale continental glaciation. Most recently, beginning 3 million years ago, northern hemispheric glaciation expanded and developed cyclic variations known as the ice age cycles. With the 19th-century discovery of these cycles in ice extent and climate, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration were proposed as a possible cause. Since the 1980s, scientists have produced detailed reconstructions revealing that, during ice ages, atmospheric CO2 was as much as a third lower than its preindustrial concentration—enough to explain almost half of the approximately 5 °C ice age cooling by weakening the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. The consensus is that the ice age climate cycles result from cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit, which redistribute sunlight between regions and seasons but do not in themselves significantly heat or cool the globe on an annual-average basis. If so, the regional and seasonal effects of orbital change must cause changes in aspects of the Earth system that then induce changes in global annual-average climate. Changes in the reflection of sunlight by the ice sheets are widely believed to have played such a role. Atmospheric CO2 appears to be a second key Earth system property, and one that caused the ice age cycles to be global rather than simply regional phenomena. The ocean was likely the dominant driver of atmospheric CO2 change between warm “interglacial” and cold “glacial” periods, through multiple aspects of its behavior. First, ice age cooling and other changes allowed bulk global seawater to absorb additional CO2 from the atmosphere. Second, during ice ages, the ocean’s “biological carbon pump” was stronger: Ocean plankton and their sinking debris more effectively removed CO2 from surface waters and the atmosphere, sequestering it in the ocean interior. Polar ocean changes were key to this stronger biological pump, involving some combination of changes in biological productivity, ocean circulation, and air–sea gas exchange. Third, the net effect of these ocean changes was to enhance deep ocean CO2 storage and thus to dissolve calcium carbonate sediment off the seafloor, changing the ocean’s acid/base chemistry so that it absorbed additional CO2 from the atmosphere. The specific polar ocean changes that drove the strengthening of the biological carbon pump and the ensuing seafloor calcium carbonate response are a topic of ongoing debate.

The astonishing development of computer technology since the mid-20th century has been accompanied by a corresponding proliferation in the numerical methods that have been developed to improve the simulation of atmospheric flows. This article reviews some of the numerical developments concern the ongoing improvements of weather forecasting and climate simulation models. Early computers were single-processor machines with severely limited memory capacity and computational speed, requiring simplified representations of the atmospheric equations and low resolution. As the hardware evolved and memory and speed increased, it became feasible to accommodate more complete representations of the dynamic and physical atmospheric processes. These more faithful representations of the so-called primitive equations included dynamic modes that are not necessarily of meteorological significance, which in turn led to additional computational challenges. Understanding which problems required attention and how they should be addressed was not a straightforward and unique process, and it resulted in the variety of approaches that are summarized in this article. At about the turn of the century, the most dramatic developments in hardware were the inauguration of the era of massively parallel computers, together with the vast increase in the amount of rapidly accessible memory that the new architectures provided. These advances and opportunities have demanded a thorough reassessment of the numerical methods that are most successfully adapted to this new computational environment. This article combines a survey of the important historical landmarks together with a somewhat speculative review of methods that, at the time of writing, seem to hold out the promise of further advancing the art and science of atmospheric numerical modeling.