HURRICANES have appeared spontaneously in models of the Earth’s 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 “really quite staggering”, says Julia Slingo, who heads a…
