Climate Models: Learn the basics of climate physics and coding

Topics covered will include, principles of the conservation of energy, theories and observations of Earth’s energy balance and climate feedbacks. Throughout the course, a mixture of lectures and interactive Python exercises with Jupyter notebook to introduce scientific principles and step-by-step Python practices to students will be introduced. This course is unique in several ways: 1) it provides hands-on exercises for students to explore the physical principles of Earth’s energy balance and climate feedbacks; 2) it allows students to learn Python coding with Jupyter notebook and apply it to study a societally relevant scientific question, i.e., the physical basis of climate change. This course will advance students’ understanding of dynamical models and the concept of climate change through hands-on practices of building dynamical models and exploring physical principles driving climate change. In addition, this course will also advance students' computer literacy through introductions and exercises on writing Python code to solve and visualize simple dynamical models. These outcomes directly contribute to students’ college application success by providing students with the experience of taking a college-level class. Students will also gain demonstrative coding skills to computationally solve mathematic equations. Climate Change and/or environmental literacy is one of the core knowledge requirements of the general education at many universities. This course will prepare students for college-level courses that teach this literacy. Moreover, through coding exercises, students are also exposed to Python programming, which may inspire their interests and prepare them for the continued education in data science and computational physics and climate sciences.