Climate Modeling
Course outline:
The goal of this course is to provide
the students basic knowledge on the techniques of climate modeling, and
provide an overview of existing climate models and their capabilities.
Basic knowledge of
programming language such as Fortran or Matlab is needed.
1. History of the climate system
Orbital forcing
From Cretacous to the Late Pleistocene
The Holocene
and the Anthropocene
Future climate Change (Movie from GFDL)
2. The components of the climate system
Atmosphere
Land
Cryosphere
Biosphere
3. Conceptual low-dimensional climate models
Numerical solution of a simple ODEs
Bifurcation and Chaos
Energy Balance models
The Lorenz
'63,'84 model
The Stommel model
The ENSO recharge oscillator
4.
Solving the equations of the climate system
Numerical solution of PDEs:
Galerkin projection
Advection, Diffusion equations
Wave equation; finite differencing;
CFL criterion
Arakawa grids
Successive Overrelaxation, Poisson
equation and Stommel-Munk model
Shallow water model
finite elements and spectral methods
5. Overview of Earth-System Modeling
Overview of Ocean models
Overview of Atmospheric models
Climate models
and their assessments
Ecosystem and Biogeochemical models
Instructor: Prof. Axel Timmermann (IPRC, phone 8562720, axel@hawaii.edu)
Hours: Mondays: 2.30pm--4pm MSB
315 (Monday, September 19th has to be re-arranged)
Textbooks No required textbook, but two reference books:
McGuffie, K. and A. Henderson-Sellers
A climate modelling primer, 2nd ed. Chichester ; New York : Wiley, c1997.
Trenberth, K. E., ed., 1993:Climate system modeling (ed.), Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 817 pp.
Grading method:
General participation 25%
