Climate Models: A Key Tool to make Future Climate Projections

Climate models are based on well-documented physical processes to simulate the transfer of several variables through the climate system. Climate models use mathematical equations to characterize how energy and matter interact in different parts of the ocean, atmosphere, and land. Building and running a climate model is a complex process of identifying and quantifying Earth system processes, representing them with mathematical equations, setting variables to represent initial conditions and subsequent changes in climate forcing, and repeatedly solving the equations using powerful supercomputers. Once a climate model can perform well in hind-casting tests (simulating known climates of the past), its results for simulating future climate are also assumed to be valid. To project climate into the future, the climate forcing is set to change according to a possible future scenario. Scenarios are possible stories about how quickly the human population will grow, how land will be used, how economies will evolve, and the atmospheric conditions (and therefore, climate forcing) that would re-sult from each storyline. This talk will review the basic aspects of climate models and their applications.