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Philippines 1101
See Also: Abrupt Climate Changes; Adaptation; marked the transformation of weather forecast-
Climate Change, Effects of; Drought; Global ing from a highly individualistic effort to a coop-
Warming, Impacts of; Land Use; Land Use, Land- erative task in which teams of experts developed
Use Change, and Forestry; Preparedness; Rainfall complex computer programs. With the first digi-
Patterns; Vulnerability. tal computer in the 1950s, scientists tried to rep-
resent the complexity of the atmosphere and its
Further Readings circulation in numerical equations. Nineteenth-
Allen, K. “Community-Based Disaster Preparedness and early 20th-century mathematicians such as
and Climate Adaptation: Local Capacity-Building Vilhelm Bjerknes and Lewis Fry Richardson had
in the Philippines.” Disasters, v.30/1 (2006). failed to come up with adequate mathematical
Buan, R. D., et. al. “Vulnerability of Rice and Corn models. Through the 1950s, some leading meteo-
in the Philippines.” Water, Air and Soil Pollution, rologists tried to replace Bjerknes’s and Richard-
v.92/1–2 (1996). son’s numerical approach with methods based on
Government of the Philippines. Philippines First mathematical functions, working with simplified
National Communication on Climate Change. forms of the physics equations that described
Manila: Government of the Philippines, 1999. the entire global atmosphere. They succeeded in
Jose, A. and N. Cruz. “Climate Change Impacts getting only partial mathematical models. These
and Responses in the Philippines Coastal Sector.” reproduced some features of atmospheric layers,
Climate Research, v.12 (1999). but they could not show the features of the gen-
Pulhin, F and R. Lasco. “Climate Change and eral circulation persuasively.
Biodiversity in the Philippines: Potential Impacts Their suggested solutions contained instabili-
and Adaptation Strategies.” In Moving Forward: ties because they could not account for eddies
Southeast Asian Perspectives on Climate Change and other crucial features. Discouraged by such
and Biodiversity, edited by P. Sajise, et al. failures, scientists began to think that the real
Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, atmosphere was too complex to be described by
2010. a few lines of mathematics. The comment of such
a leading climatologist as Bert Bolin is revealing
of this skepticism. In 1952, Bolin argued that
there was very little hope for the possibility of
deducing a theory for the general circulation of
Phillips, Norman the atmosphere from the complete hydrodynamic
and thermodynamic equations. Yet, computers
Norman Phillips is a theoretical meteorologist opened up new possibilities in the field, although
who pioneered the use of numerical methods for the first digital specimens were extremely slow
the prediction of weather and climate changes. His and often broke down.
influential studies led to the first computer models Jule Charney was the first to devise a two-
of weather and climate, as well as to an under- dimensional weather simulation. Dividing North
standing of the general circulation of the atmo- America into a grid of cells, the computer started
sphere, including the transports of heat and mois- with real weather data for a particular day and
ture that determine the Earth’s climate. His 1955 then solved all the equations, working out how
model is generally regarded as a groundbreaking the air should respond to the differences in condi-
device that helped to win scientific skepticism in tions between each pair of adjacent cells. It then
reproducing the patterns of wind and pressure of stepped forward using a three-hour step and com-
the entire atmosphere within a computer model. puted all the cells again. The system was slow to
Phillips received his B.S. from the University operate and it had imperfections, but its comple-
of Chicago in 1947, and his Ph.D. in 1951. He tion paved the way for more research. Norman
was the first to show, with a simple general cir- Phillips sought to address the problems in Char-
culation model, that weather prediction with ney’s model. The challenge for meteorologists
numerical models was possible. The advent of now became the computation of the unchanging
numerical weather predictions in the 1950s also average of the weather given a set of unchang-