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Mathematic visualize climate changes

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How did we end up here? What do we do to get out of it? In climate research, it is important to understand how the world works if we are to change our behaviour and prevent future catastrophes. Researchers use mathematical formulas to try and visualise reality, in order to find out what changes we need to make.

“We build models in an attempt to represent nature’s behaviour using mathematical equations”, says David Wårlind, a researcher at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Lund University in Sweden.


Climate models are a powerful tool to predict what will happen to the climate in the future, based on various perspectives and using many different parameters. These models help us to discover the effects of our behaviour on the climate system and to determine how we might achieve different results by changing our behaviour.


When you hear about climate change and global warming, you may immediately think of traffic and the use of fossil fuels – which is not wrong as this is a crucial component. In climate models, however, it is far from the only parameter we need to include in the calculations. The climate on our planet is complicated. This is why researchers have started developing what are known as Earth system models, which take into account the oceans, the atmosphere, airborne particles and the vegetation on the ground. David Wårling is investigating land use specifically, and the way in which it affects the climate.


We build models in an attempt to represent nature’s behaviour using mathematical equations.
The atmosphere and oceans are the factors with the greatest impact on the climate. Historically, there has been very little focus on vegetation and land use.
David Wårlind explains that the models used until now to predict how the climate will behave only included land use as a static component.


“Seasonal variations have certainly been taken into account”, he continues. “In the winter, when there is snow on the ground, a lot of solar energy is reflected, whereas that energy is absorbed in the summer when the vegetation returns. But the models simply assumed that the vegetation was the same from one year to the next.”


The vegetation included in climate models until now was described in relatively simple terms. Satellite images were used to estimate the characteristics of land areas with the simplified classification of vegetation as either ”high” or ”low”, i.e. either forest, or agriculture, grass or pastureland.


“However, land use has proven to be of greater significance for the climate than previously estimated”, he explains. “For example, when we transform forest and natural vegetation into agricultural land, we affect the climate through the release of large amounts of carbon previously bound up in the vegetation and the soil. This ends up in the atmosphere instead,
contributing to global warming. The way in which solar energy is absorbed by the soil also changes along with other factors.”


Humanity’s use of land is not static. We will need more space for agriculture in order to feed the world’s increasing population. In other words, the older climate models, which take no particular account of what land areas look like, are not adequate to reliably predict what the climate will be like in the future.


“Our task is to solve this”, says David Wårlind. “The objective is to make the models much more detailed, but it is not an easy task.”


Nevertheless, David Wårlind and his research colleagues have made considerable progress. They have now succeeded in incorporating their dynamic vegetation model into a climate model, so that it can represent the details of historical land use and how it could change in the future.
This will hopefully lead to more reliable and realistic future climate projections.