A Climate Model

Fall 2001

Background:

This was the midterm project that I did in CS 471: Scientific Computing taught by Dr. Don Morton. Dr. Morton had taught was teaching the class using Climate Modeling as the basis. So, after spending The first part of the semester teaching us how to model the climate he gave us this midterm assignment.

The Problem:

The assignment was to take the BASICA program on pages 77-81 of A Climate Modelling Primer 2nd edition by K. McGuffie & A. Henderson-Sellers, port it to FORTRAN and then show that the model is correct (or at least close).The full cite of the book is as follows.

McGuffie, K. and Henderson-Sellers, A. (1997) A Climate Modelling Primer: 2nd Edition John Wiley & Sons. p. 77-81.

The Solution:

The first thing I did was to "port" it to QBasic code. This doesn't sound like much of a stretch but it involved defining the subroutines and functions. BASICA used line numbers and therefore had very crude subroutines. So, in fact, the act of porting the program from BASICA to QBASIC was more important than it first sounds. Here is the QBASIC code.

climate_model.bas.txt

After I ported the BASICA program to QBASIC, it was a matter of syntax to port it to FORTRAN. This was good because I was still learning FORTRAN. Here is the fortran code.

EBM.f

As stated before, I also had to show that the model was correct. Here is the paper I wrote in response to that part of the assignment.

Energy_balance_model.pdf

What I Learned:

This assignment taught me a lot about FORTRAN. Before this assignment it was difficult for me to sit down and write a program in FORTRAN. I would usually think of the code in another language before writing the FORTRAN code. After this project, however, I as able to think and write in FORTRAN. It also helped me realize how delicate the world's climate is to minor changes.

If I did this project again I would analyse the program in more depth. It might be better if I looked at the equations and showed that the equations form a model of the climate. All I did, the first time was change the values of each variable and explain why it produced the resutls it did.

page last updated May 2003

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