Variable World: Bay Model Tour & Salon

What’s also tricky here is the scale, finding a way to accurately grasp the forces going on within the model, and outside it of course. It’s easy to prototype and model something at 1:1, but this one is 1:1000, at least in the horizontal plane. So when you think about granularity within computer models that simulate climate, especially in the Bay area, there are micro-climates everywhere that are often collapsed or ignored simplistically. How do you create a realistic model that represents, and can project what’s actually happening? It’s challenging to integrate that into the computer model. The digital model only has a certain resolution and you can throw situations at it and sometimes get the expected results that verify your projections, and maybe the knock-on effects seem right, but really how it works in nature is often surprisingly divergent from the model. The state of the art climate model is really just the one that best conforms to a limited set of validation data. And based on these models we make determinations of risk for insurance purposes; they influence policy making and ultimately come back to us as decision making tools. I am fascinated by the scale of decision making we base on models and the latent potential for contingency.

It also seems that variability is an important part in how authority gets built up in the model. I’m remembering the moment when we were standing there and the guide said, “This is a perfect world, it doesn’t change.” She emphasized that a few times.

Ref: Variable World: Bay Model Tour & Salon – AVANT