Global warming change part of bigger picture

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By Heather Travis
Thursday, October 9, 2008
University of Western Ontario physics professor Wayne Hocking says it is important to look to the poles – the Arctic and Antarctic poles – to find the truth about global warming and other atmospheric changes.
 
 
University of Western Ontario physics professor Wayne Hocking explains to a packed room how atmospheric research in the Arctic and Antarctica can provide insight into global warming and other changes.
 
 
Images of glaciers crumbling and polar bears walking between cracks in the ice shelf are synonymous with global warming, but Hocking says this only scratches the surface of climatic change. But, he says in order to gain a better understanding of what these changes mean, the atmosphere above the poles are the best place to start.  
 
“I’m not against global warming, but I want people to realize it is only one of many dynamic events that occur in the atmosphere and we need to understand them all,” he says.
 
Hocking recently presented his polar research to a crowded room at the Physics and Astronomy Colloquium.  
 
The poles are important to study “because there’s no people living there, which makes it easier to monitor. But also, there are many different processes which originate in the poles,” he says. 
 
As a member of AxonMet, a consortium of scientists and organizations which operate meteor radars in the America longitudinal sector, Hocking is able to gather data about the atmosphere and compare measurements with other researchers. AxonMet operates 12 radars that are distributed across North and South America – from Eureka, Nunavut to Rothera, Antarctica.  
 
Included among those is the Clovar radar, which is located in London, Ont. and owned and operated by Western.
 
Meteor radars can measure atmospheric changes in temperature, wave activity, planetary motions and the structures of plasmas, among others, up to 80 to 100km above the earth’s surface. Hocking also uses wind profilers, which can detect changes in the lower atmospheres, recording measurements at 14 km altitude.  
 
Aside from satisfying general scientific curiosity about changes in the atmosphere, Hocking says the data can be used to measure trends which can be interpreted through computer models to gain a better understanding of global warming.  
 
But with all of the data he has collected on atmospheric changes over the last 15 years, Hocking is hesitant to claim he can make any predictions about global warming.
 
“For this to be effective, we need to be there for 20, 30, 40 years, have a long-term data set and then we can start to make useful predictions,” he says.
 
He says researchers do not know enough about the atmospheric changes and how they influence each other to draw any conclusions about global warming.  
 
“We know there is so much complexity involved, we want to tread more cautiously,” he says. “Maybe in 10 years time, it’ll all start to freeze over, we just don’t know.”  
 
As well, Hocking cautions against focusing solely on global warming, but rather to view it as one of many atmospheric changes that must be researched and understood.
 
“I think it’s too narrow of a view,” he says. “You’ve got to consider everything together and see global warming as part of a larger picture rather than something in isolation.”
 
Although he is working in remote regions, Hocking’s measurements in the poles have implications around the world besides studying global warming, such as increasing the accuracy of weather monitoring systems.
 
“You could have a hundred cities in Europe and you get the weather from all of them, but having one city in the Arctic ties down the predictions much more tightly,” he says. “Having a remote site can help to define the forecast much more clearly.”
 
  Daily updates from the AxonMet radars can be viewed at www.physics.uwo.ca/~whocking/axonmet/.
 

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