Many NWP courses involve the coding by students of one- or two-dimensional shallow-fluid models, and the use of these models in experiments to evaluate the influence of different numerical methods on model solutions (described in Chapter 3). This allows students to become familiar with the structural components of models, to gain experience in debugging model code, and to conduct experiments to confirm concepts discussed in the text.

This appendix suggests an overall framework for coding the shallow-fluid equations that are described in Section 2.3.3, as well as some experiments that can be part of a laboratory component of an NWP course. Because the specific programming language used will determine the details of the model code, only a high-level outline will be provided here. The best approach is to start with the development of a one-dimensional model. Figure A.1 shows a schematic of the procedure for solving such a system, using an advection equation as a simple example. The abscissa is the space dimension and the ordinate is time. A predictive equation would of course be required for u, unless a constant mean speed is employed.