General Circulation Models of the Atmosphere

Methods in Computational Physics, Volume 17: General Circulation Models of the Atmosphere is a five-chapter text that covers the fundamentals and application of general circulation models to solving practical problems related to the atmosphere. The first chapter describes the various options in modeling physical processes and computational procedures. The next two chapters illustrate the influence of practical considerations to the compromise between a detailed physical description and reasonable computing time. Other chapters outline the computational details of two different numerical schemes for general circulation models. These chapters particularly provide an in-depth analysis of finite difference methods by proceeding from general considerations of homogeneous incompressible flow to the fine details of the particular numerical scheme. The final chapter discusses the fundamentals of the alternative spectral method for a multilevel spectral model that illustrates the capability of that approach. This book is of value to geoscientists, mathematicians, and physicists.