Google Earth Simulator
Zee Badoni
The first generation of Earth Simulator, developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics. The system was developed for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC) in 1997. Construction started in October 1999, and the site officially opened on 11 March 2002. The project cost 60 billion yen.
Built by NEC, ES was based on their SX-6 architecture. It consisted of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 gigabytes of computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120 processors and 10 terabytes of memory. Two nodes were installed per 1 metre 1.4 metre 2 metre cabinet. Each cabinet consumed 20 kW of power. The system had 700 terabytes of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage in tape drives. It was able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a resolution of 10 km. Its performance on the LINPACK benchmark was 35.86 TFLOPS, which was almost five times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer, ASCI White.
ES was replaced by the Earth Simulator 2 (ES2) in March 2009.[1] ES2 is an NEC SX-9/E system, and has a quarter as many nodes each of 12.8 times the performance (3.2 clock speed, four times the processing resource per node), for a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS. With a delivered LINPACK performance of 122.4 TFLOPS,[2] ES2 was the most efficient supercomputer in the world at that point. In November 2010, NEC announced that ES2 topped the Global FFT, one of the measures of the HPC Challenge Awards, with the performance number of 11.876 TFLOPS.[3]
Sometimes I like to fly a bit in flight simulator in Google Earth (not the Pro version), and I was wondering how realistic it is. There are two planes you can fly. I included some stuff I personally tried.
Interestingly, Google Earth allows you to fly beneath the surface of oceans, and it flies exactly the same as in the air. The support for taking off from a real airport is rather limited, but it's there. It supports a full ROM afaik.
I'm pretty sure the SR22 cockpit windows would take up a much greater area of my vision than my computer screen does. Especially peripheral vision. Also in a real SR22, there is important stuff to look at below the windows.
Waving a mouse around is nothing like moving a control column around. With a control column you have a much different sense of the position of the controls. Moving a mouse involves completely different muscles and different motions.
In Google Earth you don't hear any engine, you dont feel any vibration, you don't feel any turbulence, you don't feel anything in an uncoordinated turn or when pulling out of a dive, you don't feel the unevenness of a runway.
I'm not a pilot, I have sat in the pilot's seat of a small Cessna and manipulated the control-column and rudder to make a few turns and attempt to maintain speed and altitude under the direction of a pilot. I've done the same in a glider, and I have done some take-offs and landings in a fairly amazing full (though static) commercial 737 simulator with full cockpit reproduction (all seats, panels, motorised levers, switches etc that you'd find in a real 737 cockpit, wired to a large rack of computers).
What is great about google earth flight sim is what makes it unrealistic. I can experience things I would never have the opportunity to experience: like diving down the face of Everest at full throttle, Landing at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, skimming just beneath the surface of the water as we approach LA at 1200 knots, and landing on Hadley Delta on the Moon. All for free. All safe, and tell my friends how I like to land at Boston, Heathrow, and a tiny airport in Peru surrounded by mountains.The truth is I am terrified of getting on a real plane, but Google Flight simulator's suspension of reality restores the fun of flying, and makes me wonder if I should not be so scared to get on a real plane.
As mentioned in the other answer the first main gaps are the HUD which an SR22 does not have to my knowledge and the flight dynamics which don't seem real. But keep in mind that google most like had a few people make this as a fun little addition to google earth I don't think its intended to be a realistic simulator. I am a pilot and a big fan of simulators as they are a great tool but they are just that, a tool. The flight dynamics in Google Earth are not what they would be in a real plane and I would never expect that. There are lots of issues with home based simulators and realism. There are full moving sims out there for pros but in the home market, unless you are this guy you are only going to get so much realism.
I have not flown an SR22 yet but I would imagine they dont handle like they do in that sim. There are other simulators out there (X plane) that have the ability to make very real simulations. Your seat will never move but the flight dynamics of the plane are close to the real thing and good for practice.
A real plane is not flown with a keyboard... Yet... but if you do have a joystick or yoke you can get somewhat of a feel for real planes. The issue is that your home yoke will not provide the feedback a real plane does (at least a small plane). I fly the Piper Warrior and before trim there is quite a bit of force on the controls, more than the little springs in my yoke provide.
Unless you have a bunch of monitors you will never see in a sim what you see in real life. In a real plane you can see all around you, but you need to keep in mind you are playing a game not flying a real plane.
Simulators are great tools, they can provide a great platform to train in and get to know the systems of a plane and how they work. However they will never (at least not now) replace real flying no matter how hard you try. Sim's strive for realism but they are in the end of the day a simulation of a physical experience and nothing more. The Google Earth Sim was clearly put together to be more fun than real. The runway roll was almost non existant and a single click of the up arrow put me in a stall which is clearly not realistic.
Takeoff scenarios aren't always true to typical flying conditions. Maybe one or two weeks out of a whole year, planes head east to take off at LAX; at all other times they face west, over the beach and out over the ocean as soon as they take off. But in Flight Simulator you always fly east from LAX.
Google Earth Flightsim works on the Moon and on Mars. Apparently atmospheric conditions are modeled the same as they would be on Earth, since the aircraft seem to behave the same with regard to maximum altitudes and so forth.
Model the evolution of ice sheets such as Greenland and Antarctica, and understand the factors that control their evolution and contribution to sea level rise in the coming decades/centuries. This includes basal friction at the ice/bed interface, snow precipitation, temperature, etc.
Here you will find simulations related to the Earth' interior. This includes models of geothermal heat flux and their impact on the thermal profile of polar ice sheets, models of mantle plumes under the ice, models of Glacio-Isostatic Rebound, and other models related to processes undergone by the earth lithosphere and mantle.
Hi guys, making IFR flights around FL360 and FL380, looking at the horizon both from inside the cockpit and externally, I noticed the visual effect of the roundness of the earth, I was wondering, this visual effect in reality, is not seen at levels of fly much higher?
Coupled earth system models are large computer codes that simulate the components of the climate system and how they interact - ocean, atmosphere, sea-ice, land surface, carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and aerosols. Model simulations run for weeks on high-performance supercomputers operated by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).
Together with the Bureau of Meteorology, Australian universities and international collaborators, we developed the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS), a fully coupled earth system model that provides a national weather, climate and Earth system modelling capability for operations and research. At CSIRO, we use ACCESS to contribute to major international climate modelling and prediction projects.
Through the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison project (CMIP6), ACCESS is providing input to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the world's climate future.
Other experiments allow modellers to simulate climate to 2100 for a range of future socioeconomic pathways. For example, we can compare cases where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stabilises or continues to increase at different rates. This allows us to investigate how rapidly the planet warms in each case - and how this impacts the climate in different part of the world. Some models can also simulate the carbon cycle. This means we can explore how the land and ocean take up carbon as atmospheric carbon dioxide changes and warming occurs.
[Image appears of two globes with continental outlines and coloured shading. The coloured shading represents the change in temperature at each point on the globe relative to the average temperature for 1850 to 1900. The pattern of temperature change is shown for each year from 1950 to 2100. The year is indicated at the bottom left of each globe.]
[The two globes show the same temperature changes until 2014. These results are from the CMIP6 historical simulation. In 2014 the globe shows there are very small regions with below zero temperature change. Most of the globe shows temperature changes of 0 to 1 degrees C. Some land regions show temperature changes of 1 to 2 degrees C and in the high northern latitudes there are regions of 2 to 3 degrees C with a small area up to 5 degrees C]
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