Impact of Waste Heat on Simulated Climate: A Megalopolis Scenario

The general circulation model (GCM) of the Meteorological Office (NO), U.K., was used to investigate the impact of waste heat on simulated global climate. These experiments are a further set in a series of experiments made to investigate the behavior of the simulated circulation with different scenarios and energy releases. In contrast to the previous experiments, the heat is distributed only over continental areas, where large energy and/or population densities can be expected in the future. The results suggest that the atmosphere responds very sensitively to the distribution of the heat input. Although the total hemispheric changes are smaller than in some of the previous experiments, there are still considerable areas where the difference between the perturbed model run and the control cases is large compared with the inherent variability of the model