{"id":136,"date":"2020-12-16T21:30:02","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/?p=136"},"modified":"2020-12-16T21:30:04","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:30:04","slug":"how-the-green-sahara-matters-to-crane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"How the ‘Green Sahara’ matters to CRANE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The \u201cGreen Sahara\u201d era of humid climates in Africa might not seem, at first glance, to be part of CRANE\u2019s purview. But CRANE post-doctoral researcher Deepak Chandan, who recently co-authored a research paper on climate modeling<\/a> for that period with CRANE Co-Investigator, U of T Physics Professor W. Richard Peltier, says it\u2019s very relevant to CRANE: \u201cOne of CRANE\u2019s interests is to understand why settled habitation and civilizations arose in certain places,\u201d he explains, and climate doesn\u2019t stop at borders or oceans. \u201cClimate in one part of the world can affect another. For example, research by U of T Physics graduate student Yiling Huo has shown that the West African monsoon has an impact as far away as Southeast Asia as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Deepak Chandan<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One of the challenges of such Global\nClimate Models (CGMs), is that they are “very coarse\u201d, as Chandan puts it,\nproducing singular information for an area roughly 100 km by 100 km. Chandan\nand Peltier’s goal is to find out how climate affected different areas in\ndifferent ways, and for that, they need to use \u201cdynamical downscaling\u201d, which\ninvolves running a higher-resolution Regional Coupled-Climate Model (RCM). Chandan\nsays this model \u201cgets hints for what the climate of the region should look like\nfrom the global model, but runs on a much higher-resolution grid, and contains\nphysics that the coarser-resolution global model cannot simulate.\u201d This model\nruns on a resolution of 30 km, and Chandan says they\u2019re working to narrow it\ndown even further, to 10 km.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
One of the climatological MASAT anomalies (left) and one of the MAP anomalies (right) for the mid-Holocene experiments (Chandan and Peltier 2020, Figure 2e and 2j). <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Chandan also says that because\nthere is so much data on the Green Sahara period, \u201cyou have a very good chance\nof finding relevant high-quality information that you can use to constrain the\npredictions of the models,\u201d since the phenomenon that produced the Green Sahara\naffected other surrounding regions as well, including the Arabian Peninsula,\nLevant and Mesopotamia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chandan reports that U of T Physics graduate student Fengyi Xie has been working to perfect the modeling pipeline, which will facilitate the next step of the study involving agent-based modeling of Middle Eastern landscapes and land use, and the Bronze Age communities that lived in them. Chandan says that CRANE’s agent-based modeling effort integrates climate dynamics, simulated with a high-fidelity high-resolution model, and human dynamics. This not only helps to ground and refine climate models, it also “enables us to gain valuable insights into the adaptive strategies of these historical communities, as well as their longer-term environmental impacts.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Jaime Weinman (jaimeweinman.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cGreen Sahara\u201d era of humid climates in Africa might not seem, at first glance, to be part of CRANE\u2019s purview. But CRANE post-doctoral researcher Deepak Chandan, who recently co-authored a research paper on climate modeling for that period with CRANE Co-Investigator, U of T Physics Professor W. Richard Peltier, says it\u2019s very relevant to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}