Climate Modeling

Python pathway

Programming Foundations / Practice rooms / Track curriculum and enrollment

1. Earth's Energy Budget

   All of climate science starts from one ledger: sunlight in, infrared out. This project builds that ledger from scratch, the inverse-square law that sets the solar constant, the albedo that throws part of it back, the Stefan-Boltzmann law that radiates the rest away, and the famous effective temperature of 255 K whose 33-degree gap to the real surface is the greenhouse effect waiting to be explained.

   • Sunlight: 5 lessons
   • Albedo: 5 lessons
   • Radiating It Away: 5 lessons
   • The Effective Temperature: 5 lessons
   • The Zero-Dimensional Model: 5 lessons

2. The Greenhouse Effect

   The atmosphere is nearly transparent to sunlight and nearly opaque to infrared, and that asymmetry is worth 33 kelvin. This project builds the greenhouse effect from layer models: how absorption stacks up along a path, why a single glass layer forces the surface to 2^(1/4) times the effective temperature, what N layers do (and why Venus is an oven), and the emissivity and optical-depth knobs that tune the real planet.

   • Absorbing Infrared: 5 lessons
   • The One-Layer Atmosphere: 5 lessons
   • N Layers & Venus: 5 lessons
   • Optical Depth: 5 lessons
   • The Planet's Balance Sheet: 5 lessons

3. Radiative Forcing & Feedbacks

   Push the energy budget and the climate pushes back. This project quantifies both sides: radiative forcing, the logarithmic CO2 law worth 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling, and the feedbacks that amplify or damp the response, the Planck restoring force, water vapor, ice-albedo, and clouds, combining into the single most consequential number in the field: equilibrium climate sensitivity.

   • The CO2 Forcing Law: 5 lessons
   • The Planck Response: 5 lessons
   • Feedbacks: 5 lessons
   • Climate Sensitivity: 5 lessons
   • The Forcing Agents: 5 lessons

4. Energy Balance Models

   Give the planet a heat capacity and it remembers; give it reflective ice and it can tip. This project builds the workhorse models of conceptual climate science: the transient response with its ocean-set e-folding time, committed warming in the pipeline, and the ice-albedo feedback that hands the same Sun two stable climates, one temperate, one snowball, with a hysteresis loop between them that once trapped the real Earth for millions of years.

   • Heat Capacity: 5 lessons
   • Transient Warming: 5 lessons
   • The Ice-Albedo Ramp: 5 lessons
   • Multiple Equilibria: 5 lessons
   • Snowball Earth: 5 lessons

5. The Carbon Cycle

   Between the smokestack and the thermometer sits the carbon cycle: of every tonne emitted, the ocean and land quietly take roughly half, and what stays airborne stays for centuries. This project builds the accounting, the GtC-to-ppm exchange rate, box models of the reservoirs trading carbon, the airborne fraction, the famous long tail of a CO2 pulse, and the seawater chemistry that throttles the ocean sink.

   • Carbon Bookkeeping: 5 lessons
   • Box Models: 5 lessons
   • The Airborne Fraction: 5 lessons
   • The Long Tail: 5 lessons
   • The Ocean's Throttle: 5 lessons

6. Circulation

   Explore rotation, ideal geostrophic components, angular-momentum constraints and a nondimensional overturning model. Distinguish numerical demonstrations from forecasts of actual winds or circulation transitions.

   • The Coriolis Effect: 5 lessons
   • Geostrophic Balance: 5 lessons
   • The Hadley Cell: 5 lessons
   • The Stommel Model: 5 lessons
   • AMOC Tipping: 5 lessons

7. Climate Variability

   The climate record is a trend wearing a costume of noise: El Nino spikes, volcanic dips, and the red wander of a system with memory. This project builds the statistical toolkit, anomalies and climatology, the AR(1) model that explains why climate noise is red, a toy ENSO oscillator, honest trend fitting, and the tail arithmetic showing how a small shift of the mean multiplies heat extremes.

   • Anomalies & Climatology: 5 lessons
   • Red Noise: 5 lessons
   • A Toy ENSO: 5 lessons
   • Trends vs Noise: 5 lessons
   • Extremes: 5 lessons

8. Climate Data Analysis

   Between raw station and satellite grids and a headline like 'warmest year on record' sits careful arithmetic. This project builds it in numpy: the cos-latitude weighting without which global means are wrong, zonal averages, anomaly baselining, per-gridcell trend maps and the Arctic's amplified warming, the lead-lag correlations read from ice cores, and the signal-to-noise ratio that decides when a change has officially emerged from the noise.

   • Area Weighting: 5 lessons
   • Baselines: 5 lessons
   • Trend Maps: 5 lessons
   • Ice Cores: 5 lessons
   • Signal & Emergence: 5 lessons

9. Scenarios & Projections

   Construct annual emissions pathways, examine conditional TCRE budgets and run a simplified response model. Compare common horizons and baselines, including explicit limits on removals and sea-level approximations.

   • Emission Pathways: 5 lessons
   • TCRE & Carbon Budgets: 5 lessons
   • A Two-Timescale Model: 5 lessons
   • Sea-Level Rise: 5 lessons
   • Comparing Futures: 5 lessons

10. Capstone: A Mini Earth-System Model

    Compose annual emissions, a proportional carbon sink, logarithmic forcing, two additive thermal modes and illustrative impacts. Record shared baselines, units, initial conditions and completed-year timestamps before comparing conditional scenarios.

    • The Carbon Module: 5 lessons
    • The Forcing Module: 5 lessons
    • The Temperature Module: 5 lessons
    • The Impacts Module: 5 lessons
    • Boot the Earth: 5 lessons