Stanford offers free online public courses

Stanford’s new free online free data modeling courses attracted well over 30,000 registrations. They have decided to delay the courses while they put on a final polish. Still time to register before they begin. Check out the bottom of one of the class pages for more classes such as game-theory and machine-learning.

Probabilistic Graphical Models
http://www.pgm-class.org/
(See also http://pgm.stanford.edu/ )

Model Thinking
http://www.modelthinker-class.org/
(See also http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~spage/)

 

UVic_ESCM 2.8 Build Notes

A new earth system climate model of intermediate complexity has been developed and its climatology compared to observations. The UVic Earth System Climate Model consists of a three-dimensional ocean general circulation model coupled to a thermodynamic/dynamic sea-ice model, an energy-moisture balance atmospheric model with dynamical feedbacks, and a thermomechanical land-ice model. In order to keep the model computationally efficient a reduced complexity atmosphere model is used. Atmospheric heat and freshwater transports are parametrized through Fickian diffusion, and precipitation is assumed to occur when the relative humidity is greater than 85%. Moisture transport can also be accomplished through advection if desired. Precipitation over land is assumed to return instantaneously to the ocean via one of 33 observed river drainage basins. Ice and snow albedo feedbacks are included in the coupled model by locally increasing the prescribed latitudinal profile of the planetary albedo. The atmospheric model includes a parametrization of water vapour/planetary longwave feedbacks, although the radiative forcing associated with changes in atmospheric CO2 is prescribed as a modification of the planetary longwave radiative flux. A specified lapse rate is used to reduce the surface temperature over land where there is topography. The model uses prescribed present-day winds in its climatology, although a dynamical wind feedback is included which exploits a latitudinally-varying empirical relationship between atmospheric surface temperature and density. The ocean component of the coupled model is based on the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Modular Ocean Model 2.2, with a global resolution of 3.6° (zonal) by 1.8° (meridional) and 19 vertical levels, and includes an option for brine-rejection parametrization. The sea-ice component incorporates an elastic-viscous-plastic rheology to represent sea-ice dynamics and various options for the representation of sea-ice thermodynamics and thickness distribution. The systematic comparison of the coupled model with observations reveals good agreement, especially when moisture transport is accomplished through advection.

The UVic Earth System Climate Model: Model Description, Climatology, and Applications to Past, Present and Future Climates
Andrew J. Weaver, Michael Eby, Edward C. Wiebe, Cecilia M. Bitz, Phil B. Duffy,
Tracy L. Ewen, Augustus F. Fanning, Marika M. Holland, Amy MacFadyen, H. Damon Matthews,
Katrin J. Meissner, Oleg Saenko, Andreas Schmittner, Huaxiao Wang and Masakazu Yoshimori (2001)
http://mgg.coas.oregonstate.edu/~andreas/pdf/W/weaver01ao.pdf

 

Goddard? Giggitty!

My private corner of the internet has been interrupted by Steve-Goddard-spam. His 2011-2007 comparison of Sept 26 seems to be a real hit among some. This is tied into the tired ‘sea ice recovery’ meme. Of course, he isn’t comparing 2007 sea ice minima with 2011 minima. So I did it myself. Per IJIS, the 2011 minima was 20110909 and 2007 minima was 20070924. So I grabbed those two pics from the Cryosphere archive, color inverted one, and overlayed them. Click for the result.

 

Dissipation: rhinohide.cx

Looking over some past posts, I noted that links to rhinohide.cx are dead. Contacting the bare-bones free host service for rhinohide, it appears that there has been what is likely an unrecoverable crash without hope of restoration. This is unfortunate, but most of my climate related code and charts should be recoverable from local files. This mostly affects code and charts from 2010. On the other hand, I’m leaving on a lengthy vacation this week. Timing is everything: I was working on setting up a data transfer from rhinohide.cx to rhinohide.org before I left. In September, I’ll restore what I can.

 

SST Regions: Tropical West Pacific, 23N-23S, 120E-180E

Next up is the Tropical West Pacific as defined by a bounding box 23N-23S, 120E-180E. There are some issues cropping HadSST2. I noticed it in the NW Pacific as well, but thought it was related to the fact that what should have been the upper row was all ‘NA.’ Gonna have to crack the raster ‘crop’ code open. However, I doubt that a row more or less on the boundaries will materially affect the results.

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SST Regions: NorthEast Pacific 23N-65N, 120E-180E

Next up is the NorthEast Pacific as defined by a bounding box 23N-65N, 100W-180W. Over the weekend, there were some modifications to my first presentation. Inverted the x-axis on the Fourier chart. Formatted the freq text on Fourier chart. Created a preset color scale for the maps. Colors and cuts from HadSST2 map. I also saved off the ERSST annual raster so that I don’t have to recalculate it for each run.

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GISTEMP: Build Notes

I received an email request to assist in a linux build of GISTEMP. Looking at my old notes and directories, I realized that I did not have an end-to-end instruction set. And as far as I can tell, no one else does either. So here they are. The build has become much easier, primarily due to bug fixes over the last 2 years or so, many of them initiated by findings from Barnes and Jones at Clear Climate Code.

 

Climate News and Blog Recap: 2011 03 05

Professor Bickmore takes a skeptical look at Dr. Spencer’s The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists

Roy Spencer’s Great Blunder, Part 1
Roy Spencer’s Great Blunder, Part 2
Roy Spencer’s Great Blunder, Part 3

(also … Roy Spencer’s six trillion degree warming Smith @ Not Spaghetti
Mathematical analysis of Roy Spencer’s climate model Smith @ Not Spaghetti)

Our JGR Paper on Feedbacks is Published
Spencer @ Spencer
On the diagnosis of radiative feedback in the presence of unknown radiative forcing
Spencer and Braswell, 2010
Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration
Spencer and Braswell, 2008

Looking back a bit …

Natural Warming Id @ the Air Vent
Warming in Last 50 Years Predicted by Natural Climate Cycles Spencer @ Spencer
Evidence for Natural Climate Cycles in the IPCC Climate Models’ 20th Century Temperature Reconstructions Spencer @ Spencer

Skeptical Science looks at the PDO.
Blaming the Pacific Decadal Oscillation Riccardo @ Skeptical Science

Tamino takes a look at Knudsen et al. 2011: Tracking the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation through the last 8,000 years.
8,000 years of AMO? Tamino @ Open Mind

Remiss in my duties, I have not been very systematic in my blog science searches. Some older, but not too old, pieces are included here.

For instance, I missed Two Most Excellent Pieces from The Way Things Break
Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet decay update
Tropical tropospheric temperature, instrumental and proxy trends

Speaking of slow-to-catch-on, I hope you noticed H.E. Taylor’s GW news recap at Coby’s ScienceBlogs: Illconsidered before I did. If not, hie thee thither. (or goto the source)

Brook looks back at a two year old forecast
A toy model for forecasting global temperatures – 2011 redux, part 1 Barry Brook @ Brave New Climate

Clear Climate Code is sponsoring a Google Summer of Code 2011 project.

Bart touches on the one of the two greatest sources of uncertainty (aside from hand-waving and wand-waving).
Radiative forcing by aerosol used as a wild card: NIPCC vs Lindzen Verheggen @ Our Changing Climate

Gavin discusses a paper by Pinter 2011: The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: A requiem
Requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis? Gavin @ Real Climate

 

SST Regions: NorthWest Pacific 23N-65N, 120E-180E

I extend the previous work on global and hemispheric fourier analysis with HadSST2 and ERSSTv3b into regional analysis. First up is the NorthWest Pacific as defined by a bounding box 23N-65N, 120E-180E.

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ERSSTv3b: Global Frequency Analysis

Here we use the same frequency analysis tools used for HadSST2 to look at ERSSTv3b.

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