What is climatology? Why predict the weather 50 or 100 years in the future? And how do we predict weather that's decades away when we can't predict next weeks weather accurately? David Philips, Senior Climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada is here to tell us!
https://weather.gc.ca
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DAVID PHILLIPS (ECCC Senior Climatologist):
A climatologist is somebody who is sort of like a historian and a futurist.
So, I’m interested, like everybody, all Canadians are, about the weather.
I need to know what today’s going to be like, and tomorrow, and the next couple of days, to make sure I get dressed warmly or to plan my social engagements, what have you.
But a climatologist looks back over, you know, maybe centuries, decades and centuries.
And people say, oh my gosh, how boring could that be?
I mean, that’s yesterday’s weather!
My name is David Phillips and I’m the senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.
I guess my field of interest is weather. I’m kind of a weather-weenie,* I think.
I look at the models and give Canadians a glimpse as to what would the year 2050 be like, 2100? Will we be doing different things, and what would be the stresses?
People say, oh well, you can’t forecast the weather tomorrow very accurately, how can you tell us what the weather’s going to be like in 2090?
Well, it’s simple. I mean, we’re not talking about 2090 that it’s going to rain after two o’clock in the afternoon, or you’re going to have wild winds that come up; we’re just talking about the flavour, the personality of what the seasons will be like in 2090.
We can often learn about last… about weather 30-40 years ago to give us a clue as to what the kind of conditions are going to be in the future.
A climatologist is very strong on terms of data.
I mean, I always think that you need lots of data.
We have billions of observations of data in this country, we’re very fortunate.
It’s the second-largest country in the world, and we’ve got a lot of hostile environments in this country, so we need a lot of monitoring all over the country, and we have observations that go back before Canada was even a country, back in 1840. And sometimes even the explorers had observations in their diaries that we have in part of our possession.
And you can take that past data, take 100 years of data, and then you can put it in your computer, and you can say, okay, now tell me what the next 30 years are going to be like, and that you’ve already lived through those 30 years, you could say, oh my gosh, the model’s got it right!
It said it was going to warm up by this amount.
It said you would have more wild windstorms and that.
And so, that’s why we have great confidence in our models.
So, we can go back 100 years, and we can go 100 years ahead, and give us a sense, that, no surprises. I’m more confident in what the seasons will be like in 2090 than I am trying to guess what the weather will be in Ottawa over the next two or three days.
And that’s because we have lots of data, we have good science, and we also have some of the biggest computers in the world; a supercomputer in Montreal that we use, and of course we have great scientific models that are rooted in science, physics, and mathematics.
These are some of the most brilliant scientists in the world here in Canada, and they’re working on our global climate models.
And as we move along and better understand the science of the oceans and the atmosphere, that’s critical. It’s not just the air where all the weather is, we have to look at the oceans, the sea and ice boundaries, the land.
All of this contributes to this global climate system, which is probably the most complicated system in the world -- next to the human body, how it works -- is probably the global climate system. It’s not easy, but we have the brilliant minds in Canada and around the world that are all trying to come up with a sense to provide politicians and policy people with the right information to make very difficult decisions.
You know, it’s sort of interesting, when I began my career, people couldn’t even spell climatologist, and now what I get are kids and parents who write to me and want to become climatologists, and not sort of from the science point of view, not to learn how models work and things like this, but often from the policy.
They want to make a difference, they want to be able to say to people, well okay, we’ve got to do this or that because we’re seeing runaway warming, we see challenges that we face.
And so I’m very, very optimistic about the fact that the kids actually want to be… they want wild weather and they like to be meteorologists, but, hey, there are a good number that want to follow and do climatology.
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