This book will be short, allowing it to be used as a supplement to a course on climate science or radiative transfer or equivalent. Many graduate students in oceanography, meteorology or climate science should elect to buy the book.
This book will introduce and develop the energy balance climate models for the scientific community. These models are the simplest among the hierarchy of ocean-atmosphere climate models. The EBCMs have been around for many decades and predate the introduction of large general circulation models. The models are phenomenological in the sense that they employ a few empirical parameters that are adjusted to agree with real data. Their origin lies in the balance of incoming and outgoing radiative energy at the top of the atmosphere. This book begins with the global average models and explores them from their elementary forms yielding the global average temperature to the incorporation of feedback mechanisms and some analytical properties of interest, such as temperature dependent albedo. The effect of stochastic forcing will be used to introduce natural variability in the models. The global average models are then used to introduce the concept of stability theory.
The global averages of vertical temperature dependence can also be approached analytically by first looking at simple gray body radiation layer by layer in the vertical. It will be shown that these radiative equilibrium models are unstable to convection, leading us to the radiative-convective equilibrium models. Sensitivity and temporal adjustment times of these models will be studied.
Further studies of the vertical include how heat is distributed below the Earth?s surface including its transport in the oceans via a class of simplified ocean models, ranging from the mixed layer only to oceans that employ an upwelling-diffusion mechanism.
The next step is to introduce the one dimensional or zonally averaged models (latitude dependence only). These models take into account latitude dependence of the surface temperature fields. All of the theory from the zero dimensional models can be carried over to the latitude dimensional (one dimensional) cases with the addition of a new parameter, the macroscopic thermal diffusion coefficient. Two-dimensional (horizontal) models are more involved mathematically requiring numerical solutions, but this class of models also can be fitted to data with a minimum of phenomenological parameters.
Now that all the machinery of the EBCMs is in place we turn to applications. These include chapters on: Paleoclimatology, especially the inception of continental glaciations; detection of signals in the climate system, and optimal estimation of large scale quantities from point scale data.
Throughout the book the authors will work at two mathematical levels: 1) Qualitative physical expositions of the material, and 2) Optional mathematical sections that include derivations and treatments of the equations along with some proofs of stability theorems, etc.
