Climate model

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to introduce some tools that allow climate modeling in an educational context or learn basic climate modeling principles and/or techniques.

Modeling principles

Climate models use standard modeling techniques, but often adapted to the specific requirements of modeling climate. There exist several free tools for education that allow learning various modeling principles, e.g. NetLogo includes agent-based simulation and systems dynamics (difference equations).

The software also includes a little climate simulation model that could be used in a school context to explain how simulations work.

The model is implemented as agent-based simulation: “Yellow arrowheads stream downward representing sunlight energy. Some of the sunlight reflects off clouds and more can reflect off the earth’s surface. If sunlight is absorbed by the earth, it turns into a red dot, representing heat energy. Each dot represents the energy of one yellow sunlight arrowhead. The red dots randomly move around the earth, and its temperature is related to the total number of red dots. Sometimes the red dots transform themselves into infrared (IR) light that heads toward space, carrying off energy.” ("How it works")

Netlogo climate change model

This model allows learning the general global logic. Learners (end users) can play with the following parameters.

• SUN-BRIGHTNESS (1 corresponds to our sun)
• ALBEDO, how much of the sun energy hitting the earth is absorbed. The Earth's albedo is about 0.6
• Clouds can be added or removed
• Greenhouse gases (i.e. CO2 molecules) can be added or removed

It is important to understand that this is not a realistic simulation the earth's climate, but it can explain important modeling principles and also the role of important parameters in a climate model.

Monash university simple climate model

The Monash simple climate model home page explains the model, includes some tutorials and allows to play with different scenarios and also to deconstruct models by switching offf some processes.

One included tool allows playing with various scenarios with respect to CO₂ emission

Screenshot of Monash simple climate model [source: http://monash.edu/research/simple-climate-model/mscm/index.html]

Apache Open Climate Workbench

The Apache open climate workbench (OCW) allows playing with climate models and data from various sources, e.g. creating visualizations. Installation of this software may require some system administration skills. There is a simplified installation procedure for Ubuntu (dated 2015). We did not test to install OCW so far.

According to the project home page (April 2019), “Apache Open Climate Workbench is an effort to develop software that performs climate model evaluation using model outputs from a variety of different sources the Earth System Grid Federation, the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment, the U.S. National Climate Assessment and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program and temporal/spatial scales with remote sensing data from NASA, NOAA and other agencies. The toolkit includes capabilities for rebinning, metrics computation and visualization.”

Another, older, definition of the project is on the Open Climate Workbench documentation platform: “The Apache Open Climate Workbench(OCW) is a comprehensive suite of algorithms, libraries, and interfaces designed to standardize and streamline the process of interacting with large quantities of observational data [...] and conducting regional climate model evaluations.”. Furthermore, “OCW consists of a Python library for common model evaluation tasks (e.g. area averaging, regridding, bias calculation) as well as a set of user-friendly interfaces for quickly configuring a large-scale regional model evaluation task. Users can interact with the OCW either by including the Python library directly in their code, or by way of the flexible RESTful Application Programmer Interface (API).” That means that this library also could run as web service.

M.I.T General Circulation Model

The MITgcm (MIT General Circulation Model) is a numerical model designed for study of the atmosphere, ocean, and climate. Its non-hydrostatic formulation enables it to simulate fluid phenomena over a wide range of scales; its adjoint capability enables it to be applied to parameter and state estimation problems. By employing fluid isomorphisms, one hydrodynamical kernel can be used to simulate flow in both the atmosphere and ocean.

The software is free and available on GitHub. Using it requires advanced modeling skills.

Links

There are many Wikipedia pages on climate change and climate modeling. The following screen capture shows the climate change scenarios] tool. It allows visualizing scenarios