Energy Balance Climate Model: Stella Mac and PC
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Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Learning Goals
- Energy balance and radiative equilibrium
- The concept of radiative forcing
- Planetary temperature response to variations in:
- Solar insolation
- Atmospheric water vapor or carbon dioxide
- Cloud cover
- Volcanic eruptions
- Transient response with different ocean mixed layer depths
- Climate feedbacks from temperature induced variations in:
- Atmospheric water vapor
- Surface ice-albedo
- Surface Heat Flux.
- Interpreting and creating loop diagrams to assess feedback behavior.
Context for Use
Teaching Materials
Mac Version
Mac Version of Stella Global Energy Balance Assignment ( 85kB Jun5 03) is a complete activity archive (*.sit) with Stella Model and MS word activity document. Save as GEBMMacarchive.sit to your disk and unstuff it with Stuffit expander.
PC Version
PC Version of Stella Global Energy Balance Assignment ( 80kB Jun5 03) is a complete activity archive (*.zip) with Stella Model and MS word activity document. Right click and save to your disk as GEBMPCarchive.zip. You will need WinZip to unzip these files. An evaluation copy of WinZip is available at WinZip.com .
Students can download the free "save disabled" demo version of Stella from High Performance Systems (more info) and run the Energy Balance Climate Model on their own computer or in a computer lab.
Teaching Notes and Tips
Students use a pre-made Stella Model in this activity. It is important to build the conceptual framework and clearly identify assumptions and limits of this model in class. Instructors are encouraged to guide students through the development process in an interactive lecture before having them use the model. It would be ideal if students could be guided in such a way that they make similar simplifying assumptions on their own before showing them what the completed Stella model looks like.
This activity takes approximately 3 hours to complete. If you do not have Stella at your school you can download a free demo version of Stella from High Performance Systems, Inc. (more info)
Assessment
References and Resources
Dave Bice has an excellent Global Energy Balance modeling module here Dave Bice's Modeling Earth's Climate System Module (more info) . His module has solid theoretical background and is designed to guide students through the model construction process. Introductory geoscience with a strong high school background in science and mathematics can work through his module quite successfully. The information contained within his module also compliments the material presented in GEBM activity above.
Robert MacKay has improved the Stella Model and activity described on this page, and has converted it to a JAVA based on-line activity. Mackay's JAVA GEBM. At present it runs only on PC platforms.
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (more info) is a solid reference on climate change issues.
