Climate model
The incoming energy from the Sun is in the form of short wave electromagnetic radiation, chiefly visible and short-wave (near) infrared.
For example, a simple radiant heat transfer model treats the Earth as a single point and averages outgoing energy.
Climate models are systems of differential equations based on the basic laws of physics, fluid motion, and chemistry.
Atmospheric models calculate winds, heat transfer, radiation, relative humidity, and surface hydrology within each grid and evaluate interactions with neighboring points.
Including an ice-sheet model better accounts for long term effects such as sea level rise.
The global models are essential to assimilate all the observations, especially from space (satellites) and produce comprehensive analyses of what is happening, and then they can be used to make predictions/projections.
Simple models have a role to play that is widely abused and fails to recognize the simplifications such as not including a water cycle.
Simulation of the climate system in full 3-D space and time was impractical prior to the establishment of large computational facilities starting in the 1960s.
In order to begin to understand which factors may have changed Earth's paleoclimate states, the constituent and dimensional complexities of the system needed to be reduced.
[6] Other EBMs similarly seek an economical description of surface temperatures by applying the conservation of energy constraint to individual columns of the Earth-atmosphere system.
[7] Essential features of EBMs include their relative conceptual simplicity and their ability to sometimes produce analytical solutions.
A variety of these and other reduced system models can be useful for specialized tasks that supplement GCMs, particularly to bridge gaps between simulation and understanding.
For example, astronomers know that most planets in our own solar system feature some kind of solid/liquid surface surrounded by a gaseous atmosphere.
can be factored out, giving a nildimensional equation for the equilibrium where The remaining variable parameters which are specific to the planet include This very simple model is quite instructive.
Applying radiative equilibrium (i.e conservation of energy) at the interfaces between layers produces a set of coupled equations which are solvable.
[22] Other parameters are sometimes included to simulate localized effects in other dimensions and to address the factors that move energy about Earth.
[26] Early examples include research of Mikhail Budyko and William D. Sellers who worked on the Budyko-Sellers model.
[27][28] This work also showed the role of positive feedback in the climate system and has been considered foundational for the energy balance models since its publication in 1969.
[32] In 1956, Norman Phillips developed a mathematical model that realistically depicted monthly and seasonal patterns in the troposphere.
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) has been a leading effort to foster improvements in GCMs and climate change understanding since 1995.
Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming in response to increasing greenhouse gases.
A 2012 U.S. National Research Council report discussed how the large and diverse U.S. climate modeling enterprise could evolve to become more unified.
[50] Techniques that could lead to energy savings, include for example: "reducing floating point precision computation; developing machine learning algorithms to avoid unnecessary computations; and creating a new generation of scalable numerical algorithms that would enable higher throughput in terms of simulated years per wall clock day.
