India’s National Solar Mission was approved “in principal” last week by the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change.
The solar mega-project, aimed at expanding India’s solar capacity from the current 3 megawatts (MW) to a reported 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2020 and 200 GW by 2050, will form the centerpiece of a National Climate Change Strategy and cost an estimated US$20 billion to implement.
One of the interesting things about being a scientist is seeing how unexpected observations can galvanize the community into looking at a problem in a different way than before. A good example of this is the unexpectedly low Arctic sea ice minimum in 2007 and the near-repeat in 2008. What was unexpected was not the long term decline of summer ice (this has long been a robust prediction), but the size of 2007 and 2008 decreases which were much larger than any model had hinted at. This model-data mismatch raises a number of obvious questions – were the data reliable? are the models missing some key physics? is the comparison being done appropriately? – and some less obvious ones – to what extent is the summer sea ice minimum even predictable? what is the role of pre-conditioning from the previous year vs. the stochastic nature of the weather patterns in any particular summer?
test Archive for August, 2009
India Announces Groundbreaking Solar Plan
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 by adminIndia’s National Solar Mission was approved “in principal” last week by the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change.
The solar mega-project, aimed at expanding India’s solar capacity from the current 3 megawatts (MW) to a reported 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2020 and 200 GW by 2050, will form the centerpiece of a National Climate Change Strategy and cost an estimated US$20 billion to implement.
(more…)
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Sea ice minimum forecasts
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 by adminOne of the interesting things about being a scientist is seeing how unexpected observations can galvanize the community into looking at a problem in a different way than before. A good example of this is the unexpectedly low Arctic sea ice minimum in 2007 and the near-repeat in 2008. What was unexpected was not the long term decline of summer ice (this has long been a robust prediction), but the size of 2007 and 2008 decreases which were much larger than any model had hinted at. This model-data mismatch raises a number of obvious questions – were the data reliable? are the models missing some key physics? is the comparison being done appropriately? – and some less obvious ones – to what extent is the summer sea ice minimum even predictable? what is the role of pre-conditioning from the previous year vs. the stochastic nature of the weather patterns in any particular summer?
(more…)
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