Investigating Weather And Climate Through Modeling

As climate change intensifies, it has become more important than ever for students to learn about weather systems and weather patterns. Provide your students with step-by-step instructions for creating models that demonstrate how greenhouse gases get trapped, the importance of the water cycle, and the methods experts use to make weather predictions. Readers are encouraged to refine their models, ask key questions, and synthesize what they've learned.

How does water change form? What is the relationship among pure substances, mixtures, and compounds? How do models help scientists understand the physical world? These are just a few of the questions addressed in this science experiment guidebook. From particle theory to forming a hypothesis, readers are guided through activities that make complicated concepts easy to understand and remember.

Everything contains energy, which manifests in ways such as motion, sound, light, heat, or electricity. Give your students the opportunity to create illustrative models that engage head-on with this phenomenon and its manifestations in areas like the food cycle, renewable energy, and kinetic and potential energy. This book provides essential background information about energy that is aligned to the NextGen Science Standards while also prompting readers to ask questions, think creatively, and apply what they've learned.

Much of human perception is thanks to the transmission of light and sound, from reading a book, to watching television, to walking to school. Explaining deep but foundational topics through modeling, this book helps readers visualize and represent the properties of light and sound, while contextualizing their practical uses. As students experiment with light and sound, they will master key concepts covered in the NextGen Science Standards.

As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts. Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events. Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.

"Weather, Climate and Climate Change will be essential reading to students, academics and professionals in the fields of climate, meteorology and global climate change and of broader interest to those in physical geography and environmental studies/science in general."--Jacket.

The 3rd edition of Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling is a fully revised resource for researchers and practitioners in the growing field of meteorological modeling at the mesoscale. Pielke has enhanced the new edition by quantifying model capability (uncertainty) by a detailed evaluation of the assumptions of parameterization and error propagation. Mesoscale models are applied in a wide variety of studies, including weather prediction, regional and local climate assessments, and air pollution investigations. Broad expansion of the concepts of parameterization and parameterization methodology Addition of new modeling approaches, including modeling summaries and summaries of data sets All-new section on dynamic downscaling

This volume covers aspects of numerical modeling of the atmosphere and climate from the microscales of turbulence to the very large scales associated with climate and climatic change. Each of the three major spatio-temporal scales of the atmosphere, namely, the microscale, the mesoscale, and the macroscale is addressed through a hierarchy of models. Results of model simulations are illustrated throughout the text, with many of these examples based on the author's original research work. For each type of model discussed here, the theoretical background, including governing equation sets, simplifying assumptions, and advantages and limits of the models, is provided. The topic of coupled, or nested, modeling systems as a promising approach to air pllution embedded in regional atmospheric flows, as well as to the regional atmospheric response to global climate forcings, is also addressed. An attempt is made throughout the book to highlight the highly interdisciplinary nature of atmospheric modeling, particularly in those sections dealing with climatic change issues.

The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic-and often extreme-shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less. The causes of abrupt climate changes have not been clearly established, but the triggering of events is likely to be the result of multiple natural processes. Abrupt climate changes of the magnitude seen in the past would have far-reaching implications for human society and ecosystems, including major impacts on energy consumption and water supply demands. Could such a change happen again? Are human activities exacerbating the likelihood of abrupt climate change? What are the potential societal consequences of such a change? Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises looks at the current scientific evidence and theoretical understanding to describe what is currently known about abrupt climate change, including patterns and magnitudes, mechanisms, and probability of occurrence. It identifies critical knowledge gaps concerning the potential for future abrupt changes, including those aspects of change most important to society and economies, and outlines a research strategy to close those gaps. Based on the best and most current research available, this book surveys the history of climate change and makes a series of specific recommendations for the future.

The feasibility of long-range weather prediction through the use of global general circulation models (GCMs) was investigated. A climate model was developed to simulate the monthly mean state of the atmosphere from real global initial data at the beginning of the month. The model contains the same dynamic and physical ingredients as most numerical weather prediction models and GCMs. The model generates a one-day global simulation on the 8 x 10 grid in four minutes (on an IBM 360/95 computer), so that a 30 day forecast can be executed in two hours. The high speed of the model is achieved mainly at the price of its coarse resolution, which requires certain parameterizations of surface boundary conditions, as well as inherent filtering of smaller-scale features of the initial state. Spar, J. Unspecified Center NASA-CR-157893 NGR-33-016-086