Tropical Climate Modeling: Basic Concepts and Methods

The opportunity to model the Earth´s climate is one of the biggest challenges faced by computational scientists and engineers. The issues range from poorly understood physical phenomena to difficulties implementing subgrid processes numerically. This book is concerned with the tropical climate, the 60-degree latitude band about the Equator. It begins by establishing its energy budget, and by discussing observed atmospheric water vapor and climate model uncertainties. A critical discussion of classical approaches to model cumulus clouds is given. It is argued that these representations are violating some fundamental physical laws. A new paradigm to represent precipitating clouds is then proposed. It recognizes clouds as discontinuities in the framework of continuum mechanics. Next, results of the sensitivity experiments are presented. Climatic feedbacks are analyzed by perturbing the sea-surface temperature and running the model to steady-state. This monograph is geared toward climate modelers, computational fluid dynamicists, applied mathematicians and theoretical engineers. It may also be of interest to people with a desire to influence the discussion on climate change.