ATM 623: Climate Modeling

A graduate-level course on the hands-on use of climate models for understanding climate processes.

Brian E. J. Rose

University at Albany, Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences

Course home page

About these notes:

This document uses the interactive IPython notebook format (now also called Jupyter). The notes can be accessed in several different ways:

• The interactive notebooks are hosted on github at https://github.com/brian-rose/ClimateModeling_courseware
• The latest versions can be viewed as static web pages rendered on nbviewer
• A complete snapshot of the notes as of May 2015 (end of spring semester) are available on Brian's website.

Many of these notes make use of the climlab package, available at https://github.com/brian-rose/climlab

This page is the top-level notebook with links to all notes and assignments.

Lecture notes

1. Planetary energy budget
2. Solving the zero-dimensional EBM
3. Climate Sensitivity and Feedback
4. Climate System Components
5. A Brief Review of Radiation
6. Elementary greenhouse models
7. Grey radiation modeling with climlab
8. Modeling non-scattering radiative transfer
9. Who needs spectral bands? We do. Some baby steps...
10. Clouds and cloud feedback
11. Insolation
12. Orbital variations, insolation, and the ice ages
13. Heat transport
14. The one-dimensional energy balance model
15. Seasonal cycle and heat capacity
16. A peak at numerical methods for diffusion models
17. Ice albedo feedback in the EBM
18. Snowball Earth and Large Ice Cap Instability in the EBM
19. The surface energy balance
20. Water, water everywhere

Assignments

1. Fun with Python (not posted)
2. Albedo feedback in the zero-dimensional EBM
3. Climate Sensitivity and Feedback
4. Energy budget in CESM
5. Radiative forcing in a grey radiation atmosphere
6. Modeling radiative forcing and feedback with climlab
7. Orbital variations and insolation
8. Numerical solution of the diffusion equation using the implicit method (see end of Lecture 16)

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Credits

The author of this notebook is Brian E. J. Rose, University at Albany.

It was developed in support of ATM 623: Climate Modeling, a graduate-level course in the Department of Atmospheric and Envionmental Sciences, offered in Spring 2015.

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