Science medalist Washington
pioneered parallel climate models
Posted November 17, 2010
For Warren Washington, climate and computers have gone together for more than 50 years. In 1958, as a master’s degree student at Oregon State College (now University) he used a first-generation vacuum-tube machine to model a single cap cloud over an isolated mountain peak.
Washington now has more computer power at his disposal than he could possibly have dreamed in the ’50s. As a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., he works with colleagues to develop revolutionary models of Earth as a living planet – on some of the world’s most powerful computers, those of the U.S. Department of Energy.
When Washington accepts the National Medal of Science from President Obama today, it will highlight a remarkable three-decade relationship. Over that time, Washington and his colleagues have merged climate science with DOE high-performance computers to help change how the world understands climate and how climate scientists use computers.
Climate science and the DOE: a partnership in parallel
The only concern most Americans had about fossils fuels in the mid-1970s was avoiding gas station lines and spiking prices. But among atmospheric scientists, fossil fuels already were at the heart of another problem: manmade climate change.
The National Academies of Sciences’ groundbreaking 1975 report “Understanding Climate Change” began with language that still sounds fresh: “The increasing realization that man’s activities may be changing the climate … have brought new interest and concern to the problem of climatic variation. Our response to these concerns is the proposal of a major new program of research designed to increase our understanding of climatic change and to lay the foundation for its prediction.”
Washington, a member of the NAS committee that produced the report, already was on the job. Within months of joining NCAR in 1963, the ink barely dry on his doctoral thesis, he’d started to co-develop an atmospheric General Circulation Model. He and NCAR atmospheric scientist Akira Kasahara had daily meetings with a small team of computer programmers at the center to finesse their simulation.
The team was thrilled a couple of years later, when their model could “generate more realistic storm systems, and we were even able to display them on a cathode ray tube device that was filmed by a camera,” Washington says.
So in 1978, Washington was a natural pick when DOE sought an NCAR researcher who could help examine the potential climate impacts of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil-fuels. It has proved to be an enormously successful partnership, spurring one of the world’s leading climate-modeling collaborations and involving more than $40 million in DOE support, primarily from the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER).