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The team's analysis was led by Anna J. van der

Sept. 18, 2018 by Carolyn Mueller

The team's analysis was led by Anna J. van der Laan, an atmospheric geographer at the University of Basel who has an extensive background in studying wind, tides, and gravity. She was also studying the motion of the earth, which van der Laan and others call the VLJ. In fact, they were not able to get the data they did to use wind, rather they relied on a system of simple numerical equations that are much easier to understand than the ones they had read before. Van der Laan's team used this system for their analysis, and for their analysis, the VLJ is a "new tool" for understanding wind and tides.

"The VLJ is a new tool for understanding wind and tides," van der Laan explained. "This allows us to look at the structure of wind interactions at a distance and make predictions about how they will respond to changes in wind direction."

Van der Laan and her team wanted to create a new climate model that looked at how much wind and tidal forces—the effects of temperature change on wind direction—would have a profound effect on the future climate.

"For the VLJ, any time we have change in wind direction in that direction we have a large amount of uncertainty about how much wind change is coming to the surface of the earth," van der Laan explained.

The model was then updated to incorporate the changes in wind direction that the model did not predict. Van der Laan and her team then calculated the amount of wind that could affect the Earth over the next 3,000 years, with some of that wind hitting on a regular basis and others hitting almost every other day or even every minute of every day. Their calculations were published in the Physical Review Letters.

"These are very important information about the potential effects on the Earth of climate change that we are now able to use to get more precise insights into the potential effects of climate change," van der Laan explained. "We have a very strong scientific community that is interested in making all the information available that can be used to better understand the potential effects of climate change on the Earth."