HURRICANES have appeared spontaneously in models of the Earth鈥檚 climate, as in real life.
The Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan, is the most powerful supercomputer in the world. While standard climate models divide the surface of the Earth into boxes a few hundreds of kilometres across, the Earth Simulator can run models at resolutions down to 10 kilometres.
The computer started running in March 2002, and the first results are being presented in Cambridge, UK, this week. One cause for celebration was the appearance of the first hurricanes. The results are 鈥渞eally quite staggering鈥�, says Julia Slingo, who heads a climate science centre at the University of Reading, UK. In one sequence, she says, 鈥測ou can see a typhoon going up to Japan and it even has a little eye鈥�.
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Weather forecasts already model hurricanes over several days, but the Earth Simulator will predict the climate decades ahead.