A reality check for climate models

摘要

It's not just more reliable weather forecasts we can expect by swapping complex numerical models for the simpler ones advocated by British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson. Robin Hogan at the University of Reading, UK, believes that such power laws could also act as a vital reality check on climate models. Put simply, if a given model doesn't reproduce the real atmosphere's multifractal behaviour and its power laws, something must be missing.