Numerical Weather Prediction - Applications - Climate Modeling

Climate Modeling

A General Circulation Model (GCM) is a mathematical model that can be used in computer simulations of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean. An atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) is essentially the same as a global numerical weather prediction model, and some (such as the one used in the UK Unified Model) can be configured for both short-term weather forecasts and longer-term climate predictions. Along with sea ice and land-surface components, AGCMs and oceanic GCMs (OGCM) are key components of global climate models, and are widely applied for understanding the climate and projecting climate change. For example, they can be used to simulate the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and study its forcings on global climate and the Asian monsoon circulation. For aspects of climate change, a range of man-made chemical emission scenarios can be fed into the climate models to see how an enhanced greenhouse effect would modify the Earth's climate. Versions designed for climate applications with time scales of decades to centuries were originally created in 1969 by Syukuro Manabe and Kirk Bryan at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. When run for multiple decades, the models use a low resolution, which leaves smaller-scale interactions unresolved.