Question: How does a climate model effect your studies?

James Pope answered on 24 Jun 2012:

Hey boxofstrawbs,

In my project, I take the climate model and change settings inside the model and see what happens when I run it with these changes. The settings I change are the way the climate model simulates (or views) the processes that are going on in the climate system all around us, these are things like the conditions that form clouds, or the way plants interact with the climate.

By making these changes I can change the amount of warming the model gets from increasing carbon dioxide, so I can use this to understand how the climate system responds to greenhouse gases. I can make these changes to the model because these settings are processes in the climate system of the Earth that we don’t fully understand, and some of my friends here in Leeds University are working on understanding these better, mainly by flying a research plane into really bad weather and low levels to measure what is going on! They are really crazy people! To allow me to do what I do to the model, I work with scientists from the Met Office, and I have also had to do some work there as well.

So I guess the way the model responds to the changes I make affects the way my studies develop, when I have run a group of model runs (which I call an Ensemble) I look at the results and depending on what has happened will decide where I progress with the experiments. I am just at this stage at the moment, and it is definately the exciting bit!