uszkanni

This post is a bit muddled...

Kinda "mixing your metaphors" here; 20km above the earth but each cell being 1/7th mile (area, I presume, hence square miles). That notwithstanding, the math doesn't work. The earth's radius is about 6380 km (on average), add 20 and we get around 6400. The surface area of such a sphere is about 514,718,540km. Divide by a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) and you get a cell that's around .0005 km in area. That's a cell about .0002 square miles, which is a whole lot less than 1/7th of a mile.

It's been a very long time since I last worked on GCMs but, in those days, the typical lat/lon resolution was around 2.5/2.75 degrees (or some such), which meant that each atmospheric level had about 90x72 cells. I think that nasa/noaa/ncar are looking at GCMs with grid resolutions of around 3-5km (but I've been away from that field for many, many years, so don't hold me to those numbers) which means that each level would contain about 20-50 million cells, nowhere near a trillion.

And why 20km? The difference in surface areas of a sphere 6380 vs 6400km is less than 1%.

What makes you think NSA is bothering with 128 bit encryption? Ask instead, for example, how much computing power you need to monitor a whole lot (ie, a nation's worth) of phone conversations (especially cell and sat) and apply word spotting software to pull out "interesting" conversations in real-time. If you think this isn't happening then I would suggest you go back and review the now public disclosures of Bush's (Bush the Lesser, not Bush the Elder) warrant-less wiretaps.

This comes off sounding a bit snide, like an ad hominem attack.