Climate Change Modeling: Computational Opportunities and Challenges

by Dali Wang, Wilfred M. Post, and Bruce E. Wilson

Over the past several decades, researchers have made significant progress in developing high-fidelity climate models to advance our understanding of climate systems and improve our ability to project future climate scenarios. Models can range from relatively simple radiant-heat transfer models to fully coupled general circulation models of the global climate, which discretize and solve the full 3D equations for mass and energy transfer and radiant exchange. Here, we focus on the spatially explicit climate models used to simulate the interactions of Earth's systems — that is, atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice. FULL ARTICLE (login required) »