Supercomputer Re-Creates One of the Most Famous Pictures of Earth 18
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA's last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photograph of our planet. The image became known as the Blue Marble -- the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-created that image during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.
To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble -- including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean -- the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union's Destination Earth project, which aims to create a 'digital twin' of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.
To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble -- including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean -- the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union's Destination Earth project, which aims to create a 'digital twin' of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.
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And on the 100th anniversary... (Score:2)
They invent the time machine and send back a still image.
your model is wrong (Score:2)
Looking at the image, Marbles.jpg [mpimet.mpg.de], it seems that Antarctica is covered my much less cloud in the model. Which means less thermal radiation reflected into space, which means increased warming. In the model.
I realise this is just one image from one day, but I just had to say.
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my guess is they tweaked the input until their algorithm produced the desired image in an acceptable number of iterations, so any value this has is mostly artistic. i could be utterly wrong, though, because in observing the finest /. traditions i have barely read even the abstract.
Both images are fake (Score:1)
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But you won't read about that in the Mainstream Media.
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Re: Famous to who? (Score:2)
Original Was Great - Recreation Pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
How much did it cost the American taxpayer?