Modeling Earth's Temperature

Students use the STELLA program to create hierarchies of models of increasing complexity to understand the absorption of solar energy by the Earth and its radiation of that energy back to space. They first assume that Earth is a perfect black body lacking an atmosphere, then move on to incorporate the fact that Earth reflects much of the solar radiation incident upon it, and later incorporate the fact that Earth has an atmosphere. Each time they build onto the model students evaluate the output and compare it to actual Earth surface conditions to see how well each model refinement captures the reality of the physics of heat absorption, exchange, and emission. A second lab asks students to take their STELLA model of an Earth with a two-layer atmosphere and code it into fortran.