Climate system modeling

Description

The student will learn the conceptual basis of earth system modeling and its major components. The student will learn how the atmospheric, oceanic, cryogenic and ecosystems components can be modeled separately and how they can be coupled using examples from state-of-the-art models. The student will be exposed to strategies to design numerical experiments, verification and validation procedures using both ensemble techniques and probabilistic approaches. At the end of the course, the student will have a grasp of logic and rationale framing of earth system modeling, and will develop a capacity to design numerical experiments and a critical understanding of the verification and validation procedures.

Course contents

Contents

1. Introduction and Historical Developments
2. Physical Description of the climate system
3. Basic Numerical methods for constructing the Earth System Model
4. Numerical Grids
5. Finite Differences
6. Spectral Methods
7. Lagrangian Methods
8. Spectral Elements
9. Finite Volume
10. Components of the Climate system
11. Atmosphere General Circulation Model: adiabatic component
12. Atmosphere General Circulation Model: diabatic processes
13. Atmosphere General Circulation Model: convection
14. Ocean General Circulation Model 
15. Sea-ice models 
16. Land 
17. Terrestrial ecosystems models
18. Marine biogeochemistry
19. Atmosphere chemistry
20. The concept of climate system simulations
21. Hierarchy of global coupled models
22. The General Circulation Model as a Numerical Laboratory
23. Strategies for the design of numerical experiments
24. Verification, diagnostics and fidelity of global models.
25. Sensitivity to small perturbations
26. Probability Distributions
27. The rise of AI in weather and climate sciences.
28. Dynamical modeling and Statistical Modeling
29. Modeling with Deep Learning methods
30. Prospects of global climate modeling

Notes

• $\text{LATEX}$ notes can be downloaded here.
  • Source code here.

Exam

Written + Oral. Previous years questions here.

Reading material

• W. Washington, C. Parkinson, An Introduction To Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, University Science Book, 2005 (Main textbook; available here)
• K. Trenberth, Climate System Modeling, CUP, 2010 G. Vallis, Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics: Fundamentals and large-scale circulation, CUP, 2017
• DeCaria, GE Van Know, A first course in atmospheric numerical modelling, SunDog, 2014

Resources

• Course webpage
• Classes material and notes here¹
• Comprehensive collection of material from previous years here
• https://wanderer.cmcc.it ²
• Interpolation for Ocean and Atmospheric Data here
• The Climate Laboratory (Brian Rose)
• Relevant python packages: numpy, scipy, matplotlib, xarray, cartopy, climlab, (lcclim, pandas, dask)
• Zapata Packages here

Footnotes

1. Decryption key: Go4hOnlNYszI7QySrvLmWA (Why?) ↩

2. credentials: {user: cmcc, psw: pD8phJg3e76J} ↩