climlab#

Overview of the CLIMate LABoratory project#

Brian Rose is the lead PI of the Climate Laboratory Project, comprising two interconnected pieces:

The Climate Laboratory project, Bringing hands-on interactive climate modeling into the classroom

A one-slide public summary of the Climate Laboratory project as of October 2020#

These initiatives were originally funded through an NSF CAREER award.

climlab: a Python-based toolbox for process-oriented climate modeling#

climlab is an open-ended engine for interactive, process-oriented climate modeling for use in education and research. It is motivated by the need for simpler tools and more reproducible workflows with which to “fill in the gaps” between blackboard-level theory and the results of comprehensive climate models. With climlab you can interactively mix and match physical model components, or combine simpler process models together into a more comprehensive model. climlab is used in the classroom (undergraduate and graduate) to put models in the hands of students, and emphasize a hierarchical, process-oriented approach to understanding the key emergent properties of the climate system. climlab is equally a tool for climate research, where the same needs exist for more robust, process- based understanding and reproducible computational results (Held 2005; Jeevanjee et al. 2017).

A list of climlab-related resources:

climlab is freely available under the permissive MIT license. If you find it useful in research, teaching, or outreach, please consider reporting your usage here on github.

The Climate Laboratory book#

A hands-on approach to climate physics and climate modeling

The Climate Laboratory by Brian E. J. Rose is an online, interactive textbook on fundamentals of climate science, powered by climlab.

This book is powered by JupyterBook, and aims to be all of the following:

  • self-reproducing (most figures are self-generating in the notebooks)

  • free and open (permissive license, sources and content available through github)

  • interactive (integration with JupyterHub and Binder will allow readers to run and modify code examples)

  • a living document (content will continue to evolve, and collaboration is welcome)

To view the book online, go here.

The JupyterBook source and all book content (mostly Jupyter Notebook files) are all in this github repository.

The contents of this book are licensed for free and open consumption under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

The book is the primary text for Brian’s undergraduate Climate Laboratory (ENV 415) and graduate Climate Modeling (ATM 623) courses at UAlbany (see Teaching page for links).