Schär, for example, is now working with models at a much higher resolution-1 to 2 kilometers-which provide a much more accurate picture of meteorological activity. Over the next few years, scientists hope to address this imprecision. "If we don't know how many clouds are forming in the tropics, then we don't know how much sunlight is hitting the earth's surface-and hence we don't know the actual size of the global energy balance." "But predicting future climate change is still pretty imprecise," Schär says. The workaround, at present, is to add extra parameters to the model in order to map clouds. Yet it is precisely these thunderstorm cells-and where they occur-that drive atmospheric circulation, especially in the tropics, where solar radiation is highest. This scale is too coarse to map small-scale, local thunderstorm cells. In order to build a global climate model, grid points spaced around 50 to 100 kilometers apart are used.
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