Further Studies of the Impact of Waste Heat Release on Simulated Global Climate: Part II

The general circulation model (GCM) of the Meteorological Office, UK (UKMO), has been used to investigate the impact of an input of waste heat (1.5 x 10e14 watts equally divided between two energy parks) into the atmosphere. This experiment is the fourth of a series of experiments made to investigate the behaviour of the simulated circulation with different scenarios and energy releases. The results of this experiment have been compared with those of three earlier experiments described in Murphy et al. (1976) and Williams et al. (1977). Although the total heat input was the same as in a previous experiment, the different locations of the heat islands caused a different response in the various climatic variables. It also can be said that EX04, in general, produced smaller changes than the previous experiments. They are, however, still significant. Temperature and wind at sigma level 0.5 have been considered for all experiments as this has not previously been done for any of the experiments. Finally, a new attempt has been undertaken to assess the model variability by using 10-day means instead of 40-day means for calculating the standard deviation of the control cases. The signal-to-noise ratios have been recalculated, and a much smoother distribution has been obtained