How computers have changed the way we do physics - Chaos and climate change
In this lecture, Myles Allen addressed how computers have transformed our understanding of the role of chaos and exponential error growth in weather forecasting; and our understanding of how climate change is impacting regional weather. He showed how research in Oxford Physics, made possible by high-end computing, is demonstrating the crucial role of eddies in controlling ocean climate; and how the probability of extreme weather events may respond to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. He concluded by throwing out a more controversial suggestion that super-computers haven’t really contributed very much to the problem of predicting century-timescale changes in global average temperature, however much they may have contributed to understanding the regional implications of large-scale warming.