Editor’s Note: This week, Bill Hobbs, from the Ecotality Blog writes about the new research that will impact global warming and climate change predictions. Science is improving.

“Abondance is the French Alps’ first ski station to fall apparent victim to global warming. It will almost certainly not be the last,” reports the Associated Press. One year there’s not much snow and the AP is certain it’s global warming? It could be global warming, but it also could be that next year the place will be inundated with snow. I recall a few years ago the Colorado ski resorts were bemoaning a lack of snow. Last year: snow was abundant.

So, is the lack of snow this year at the Abondance ski resort in the French Alps a sign of global warming or just a sign that, this year, they didn’t get a lot of snow? The AP’s journalists aren’t equipped to make such a call.

But the science of global climate change is improving:

Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. (AER), a leader in earth, ocean, atmosphere, and space science R&D, announced a major new development that will impact global warming and climate change predictions. Supported by the US Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, AER’s rapid radiative transfer model for short wave energy has recently proven to be very effective in improving operational weather forecasts. The potential impact on global climate models is now under study.

“The importance of this advance is that all global warming and climate change predictions are based on models of the atmosphere, and in these models the depiction of clouds and how clouds interact with the scattering of sunlight is crucial to calculating the heating of the atmosphere,“ stated Dr. Ross Hoffman, Vice President of Research & Development at AER. “More accurate simulation of cloudiness means more accurate forecasts of climate change due to CO2 increases.“

AER’s research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, should lead to improvements in climate modeling and climate change predictions, the company said in a press release, adding that AER‘s scientists “helped solve a long-standing problem of over predicting clouds over the oceans."