Question: Where does a climate model get all the equations from?

James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

hey lucky260,

The equations are all written into the computer code that makes up all the programming that is the climate model. How we work out these equations is through scientists who investigate how the weather and climate affects different parts of the world. So for the atmosphere section of the model, weather patterns such as clouds form and why and where they form.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18014564

The video at this link shows some of my colleagues doing this sort of work. They fly planes like that one into storms, and rain and winds, sometimes at really low levels (maybe 50m in the sky) to find out what is happening using various bits of equipment such as radar, wind speed measurements and chemical analysis of samples of air and water they collect.

From this, we get an idea of how weather patterns form and from this knowledge we can program our climate models. Similar work is done by oceanographers who investigate currents and temperatures and salinities in the oceans at different depths, my friend Jennifer Riley has just passed her PhD and for it she completed a line of sampling from the Arctic Ocean to Antarctic coast through the Atlantic, so work like hers goes into writing the ocean component of the models. Other scientists look at vegetation and soils, my friend Claire Ghee is doing this at Aberdeen, she looks at how soils respond to different temperatures.

So, while as a climate modeller I don’t get to do much fieldwork and outdoor science, there is plenty of it going on to help people like me produce and use a climate model. Those of us who work in climate models, often ask these scientists to work on other areas to allow us to develop better and better models all the time. So it’s a big team effort.