Boulder – Scientists in a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab dedicated Wednesday say they know the global temperature will rise by 2 degrees to 10 degrees by century’s end.
They now want to pinpoint how big that increase will be, said the lab’s new director, Alexander MacDonald.
While the lower end may add a few more really hot days to the summer and warmer days to the winter, the range’s upper figure could lead to a catastrophic rise of the ocean that would put Miami under water, McDonald said.
“It’s like if you’re on death row and the warden comes in and says, ‘You’re going to be released tomorrow or executed tomorrow’ – I can’t quite read it,” McDonald said. “We need to be able to read it. We need to limit that uncertainty so we know what’s going to happen. If it’s in the higher end, we’re in a very dangerous situation and we need to know it.”
The Earth System Research Laboratory, which employs 600 people, is the largest in the NOAA’s nationwide system of federal labs, which monitor the oceans and the atmosphere.
“We’ve created something new,” MacDonald said. “We’re going after better predictions from minutes to millennia. We have 600 people working together to understand how the Earth system works.”
While the National Weather Service makes immediate predictions, NOAA scientists work to make the predictions better as well as issue long-range forecasts spanning a few months to 100 years.
One goal of the new lab is reducing uncertainty in hurricane tracking. The error margins for tracking the storms have been reduced by a factor of four over 40 years – from 480 miles in 1962 to 120 miles in 2002, MacDonald said.
He said the margins can still be improved with better use of observations such as satellite data and unmanned aircraft.
The new lab also tracks ozone depletion, global carbon dioxide, regional air quality and climate change in the Arctic.
Staff writer Dave Curtin can be reached at 303-820-1276 or dcurtin@denverpost.com.
