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

Warning: content out of date and not maintained

You really should be looking at The Climate Laboratory book by Brian Rose, where all the same content (and more!) is kept up to date.

Here you are likely to find broken links and broken code.

About these notes:

This document uses the interactive Jupyter notebook format. 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 2017 (end of spring semester) are available on Brian's website.

Also here is a legacy version from 2015.

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. Intro to CLIMLAB
5. The climate system and climate models
6. A Brief Review of Radiation
7. Elementary greenhouse models
8. Grey radiation modeling with climlab
9. Modeling non-scattering radiative transfer
10. Who needs spectral bands? We do. Some baby steps...
11. Radiative-Convective Equilibrium
12. Transient and equilibrium response to CO2 in the CESM
13. Toy models of transient warming
14. Clouds and cloud feedback
15. Insolation
16. Orbital variations, insolation, and the ice ages
17. Heat transport
18. The one-dimensional energy balance model
19. Seasonal cycle and heat capacity
20. A peak at numerical methods for diffusion models
21. Ice albedo feedback in the EBM
22. Snowball Earth and Large Ice Cap Instability in the EBM
23. The surface energy balance
24. Land-ocean contrasts under climate change
25. Water, water everywhere

Assignments

1. Feedback in the zero-dimensional EBM
2. Introducing CESM
3. Energy budget in CESM
4. Radiative forcing in a grey radiation atmosphere
5. Height-Dependent Water Vapor Changes
6. Orbital variations and insolation
7. Numerical solution of the diffusion equation using the implicit method (see end of Lecture 17)

Dependencies and installation

These notebooks use the following packages:

• Python (compatible with Python 2 and 3)
• numpy (array-based numerical computing)
• scipy (specialized numerical recipes)
• matplotlib (graphics and animation)
• xarray (labeled datasets)
• sympy (symbolic math)
• climlab (climate modeling engine)
• ffmpeg (video conversion tool used under-the-hood for interactive animations)
• version_information (display information about package version)

We highly recommend using Anaconda Python. For example, the following commands will create a self-contained conda environment with everything you need to run these notebooks (Mac, Linux and Windows):

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda create --name atm623 python jupyter xarray sympy climlab version_information ffmpeg

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

Development of these notes and the climlab software is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under award AGS-1455071 to Brian Rose. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.