Some CMIP5 statistics
I’m attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) will be presented. CMIP5 will form a key part of the next IPCC...
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How Climate Science is Done
In the talk I gave this week at the workshop on the CMIP5 experiments, I argued that we should do a better job of explaining how climate science works, especially the day-to-day business of working...
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The History of Climate Models
For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just updated it for my course, and now it’s up on Prezi, as a presentation you can watch and play with....
View ArticleNew Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change
This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at computer science grad students with no prior background in climate science or meteorology. Here’s my...
View ArticleSpecial issue of GMD: Community software to support the delivery of CMIP5
We now have a fourth paper added to our special issue of the journal Geoscientific Model Development, on Community software to support the delivery of CMIP5. All papers are open access: M. Stockhause,...
View ArticleClimate Model vs. Satellite Data
A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of planet earth for the whole of the year 2013. The video superimposes the aggregated satellite data from...
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Weather balloons vs. climate balloons
What’s the difference between forecasting the weather and predicting future climate change? A few years ago, I wrote a long post explaining that weather forecasting is an initial value problem, while...
View ArticleClimate Model Bake-Off
Imagine for a moment if Microsoft had 24 competitors around the world, each building their own version of Microsoft Word. Imagine further that every few years, they all agreed to run their software...
View ArticleConstructive and External Validity for Climate Modeling
It’s been a while since I’ve written about the question of climate model validation, but I regularly get asked about it when I talk about the work I’ve been doing studying how climate models are...
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Climate Modeling Begins with ABC
This week I’m reading my way through three biographies, which neatly capture the work of three key scientists who laid the foundation for modern climate modeling: Arrhenius, Bjerknes and Callendar....
View ArticleWhen is a model not a model?
This is an excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate. While models are used throughout the sciences, the word ‘model’ can mean something very different to...
View ArticleIn memory of Norman Phillips
The meteorologist, Norman Phillips died last week, at the grand old age of 95. As I’ve written about his work in my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate, I’ve extracted this piece from the...
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