Climate of the Future

Habits in numerical model construction

Lucie Babel, Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University October 2, 2019

Interviews were conducted with modellers about the construction of their model.

Numerical models are omnipresent in climate research. Constructed to understand the past, to forecast future climate and to gain new knowledge on natural processes and interactions, they enable the simulation of experiments at otherwise unreachable time and spatial scales. These instruments have long been considered to be fed – let even determined – by either theories or observations alone. ...[Read More]

What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?

Sebastian Scher, PhD student, Department of Meteorology and Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden September 26, 2018

What is machine learning? Artificial Intelligence, and its subfield of machine learning, is a very trending topic as it plays an increasing role in our daily life. Examples are: translation programs, speech recognition software in mobile phones and automatic completion of search queries. However, what value do these new techniques have for climate science? And how complicated is it to use them? Th ...[Read More]

Of butterflies and climate: how mathematics helps us to better understand the atmosphere

Gabriele Messori and Davide Faranda August 1, 2017

Applied mathematics is often seen as an obscure field, which the general public has no hope of ever understanding. In the context of climate science, this is far from the truth. In fact, many mathematical concepts and ideas applied to the study of the climate system stem from intuitive arguments. While their implementation can be very complex, understanding the basic ideas behind them does not req ...[Read More]

Defrosting the freezer. Climate change and glacial meltwater

Kathryn Adamson May 15, 2017

Why are glaciers important? Glaciers cover around 10% of the global land surface. This includes the large ice sheets (e.g. in Greenland and Antarctica) as well as smaller ice caps and valley glaciers (e.g. in Iceland, Norway and New Zealand). Figure 1 shows the current distribution of glaciers around the world. Figure 1 – The global distribution of glaciers around the world from the GLIMS glacier ...[Read More]