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From Union of Concerned Scientsts
- Climate models are essential tools used by scientists to predict how Earth will respond to heat-trapping pollutants in the atmosphere.
- General Circulation Models (GCMs) simulate and understand how Earth’s oceans, land, atmosphere, and cryosphere react to changes in internal dynamics and heat-trapping pollutants.
- GCMs use equations to model energy, momentum, water interactions within the atmosphere and oceans on a three-dimensional grid.
- Climate models consist of component models for the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice that communicate through a coupler during simulations. – Parameterizations within climate models help simulate complex processes like clouds and turbulence.
Climate models are the main tool climate scientists use to predict how Earth will respond to more heat-trapping pollutants in the atmosphere.
But what exactly is a climate model? Let’s start off easy by breaking down the phrase “climate model.” The “climate” is simply the weather averaged over a long period of time. A “model” in this case is a physical approximation of a complex system. So a climate model is an approximation of the Earth’s weather over a long period of time.
Since their debut in the 1960s, scientists have been improving and increasing the complexity of climate models (check out my History of Climate Models blog), and my colleagues and I at UCS continue to use them today.
General circulation models
When climate scientists reference a climate model, they are generally referring to a general circulation model (GCM), which is the main tool climate scientists use to simulate and understand how the Earth’s oceans, land, atmosphere, and cryosphere (a word to describe the planet’s sea and land ice) respond to changes in both its own internal dynamics as well as changes in heat-trapping pollutants.
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Read the full post at Union of Concerned Scientsts.
