Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
9 - MODELLING THE CLIMATE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
Shakespeare (Macbeth)Attempts to produce models which accurately reflect the complexity of the Earth's climate is an immense challenge. Even when focusing on the priority areas of natural variability and the impact of human activities, the task is daunting. Extending it to cover all the potential causes of climate change may prove overwhelming. So the approach must be to develop systems which inspire confidence in our ability to address the priority areas, and which can then explore the sensitivity of the climate to other factors. The only way to do this is to create detailed computer models of the global climate, to evaluate the various hypotheses. The first stage is to establish whether these models are capable of producing a realistic representation of the climate and can respond to the most obvious quantifiable perturbations. The next stage is to check the relative importance of other possible causes of climate change, both to ensure we have correctly identified the priority areas and also to gain a better understanding of past events and decide how much confidence to attach to predictions of future changes.
Given these broad aims of climate modelling, the objective of this chapter is to describe the essential features of computer models of the climate and then to assess their performance in terms of reproducing known features of the climate.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Climate ChangeA Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 239 - 258Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001