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Just chatting with my husband (ocean dynamics & modelling) about defending the place of #smallTech in climate science… a shared interest that’s always felt rather esoteric, but this week I’m wondering if it’s about to get VERY REAL.

As an undergrad oceanographer I learned on the kind of models you can ‘run’ in pen-on-paper, or an Excel spreadsheet, eg: Stommel’s classic box-model of the thermohaline overturning circulation; carbonate balance and conditions of buffering of ocean acidification…
#smalltech
Jenny Andrew
This stuff is useful for getting baby oceanographers comfortable with the practice and principles of modelling, and how to integrate it with received knowledge and new observations… but it’s also solid science in its own right - robust and relevant - and there’s a reviving interest in how much more we can learn from modelling complex systems on these scales…

…and a suspicion that some problems are coming no closer to solutions by us throwing massive, multi-domain modelling at them.
Jenny Andrew
In the last few days I’m spotting climate nerds speculating about the safety of NASA’s earth observation data…

I REALLY hope someone’s onto that, but it raises questions about participation in the advancement of climate science in the face of a growing dependency - for funding, data access and storage, observing platforms, computing power - on a monopoly of politically-hostile tech companies…

Is it time to question the everything-model arms-race, and spread our bets into small-tech research?
Tom P
there was definately a lot of worry about defunding NASA and esp NOAA in the run up to the election. I've heard from some that they feel this is unlikely because of the commercial value of the data products to eg. forecasters, shipping firms, insurers etc. I'm kind of clinging to that but then it does feel like all bets are off this time. TBH non US actors should be looking at setting up alternatives, we really need more rendundancy
Steve Holden
remember how Dubbya civil servants weren’t allowed to use the words “global warming” and “climate change?” Government data could become unreliable or unavailable.
Benoît Jones
It's similar for us - I often use geotechnical finite element or finite difference models that can take hours or days to run. But the simple analytical solutions you can do by hand or in a spreadsheet are very useful as an initial way to probe and understand a problem. They can also be used to validate the sophisticated numerical modelling programs.
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