地球氣候物理學

Few topics have been as visible and important to broader society than climate change. In this course we will explore the basic physics concepts of how we understand the earth’s climate and what are the driving forces behind it. We will focus on data driven observations and physics concepts to understand the effects that govern climate phenomena as a whole. This will be illustrated by historical, long-term data, stretching into the far past of earth history as well as current day precision observations. The basic understanding developed in the course will also be applied to questions of projections for the current climate and as an extreme example the impact of a nuclear winter. Apart from teaching the basic concepts that govern earth climate, the course will also put a strong emphasis on numerical methods to perform the data analysis and modelling of the relevant effects. As such we will discuss the concepts of black body radiation, absorption spectra and the atmosphere, hydrodynamics, the density anomaly of water and thermal contraction of materials, alongside the calculations using excel and the numerical solution of differential equations, integration and curve fitting using python.

50% final exam and 50% computational projects