Fundamentals of Atmospheric Modeling Cookbook

This Project Pythia Cookbook covers the fundamentals of atmospheric modeling, including topics such as:

• basic conservation equations
• approaches to finite differencing
• numerical scheme assessments
• numerical corrections and filtering
• coordinate systems
• initial/boundary conditions
• limitations and tradeoffs in modeling

Motivation

Numerical models are widely used, but gaining expertise in how they work has often been unnecessarily challenging. This cookbook hopes to address that! This is intended for a somewhat broad audience: those with at least some atmospheric dynamics knowledge, but nearly any level of programming experience (assuming a baseline level as covered in the Pythia Foundations).

Authors

• JT Thielen
• Sam Gardner
• Roger Riggin
• Justin Spotts
• Mathieu R
• Kevin Tyle
• Brittany Freeman
• Snigdha Samantaray
• Lin Wu
• Shreya Keshri
• Gerardo Rivera Tello

Contributors

Addition contributions to discussions and decisions for this notebook by:

• Rachel Smith

Resources

This cookbook would not be possible without the vast collection of academic texts and prior work in atmospheric modeling. The key resources used in building this notebook include:

• Textbooks
  • An Introduction to Numerical Modeling of the Atmosphere, by David Randall
  • Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling, 2nd Edition, by Roger Piekle
  • Introduction to geophysical fluid dynamics: Physical and numerical aspects
• Journal Articles
  • ...
• Other Resources
  • Pet Tornado, by Brian Fiedler
  • Incompressible flow buoyant bubble

Structure

(State one or more sections that will comprise the notebook. E.g., This cookbook is broken up into two main sections - "Foundations" and "Example Workflows." Then, describe each section below.)

Section 1 ( Replace with the title of this section, e.g. "Foundations" )

(Add content for this section, e.g., "The foundational content includes ... ")

Section 2 ( Replace with the title of this section, e.g. "Example workflows" )

(Add content for this section, e.g., "Example workflows include ... ")

Running the Notebooks

You can either run the notebook using Binder or on your local machine.

Running on Binder

The simplest way to interact with a Jupyter Notebook is through Binder, which enables the execution of a Jupyter Book in the cloud. The details of how this works are not important for now. All you need to know is how to launch a Pythia Cookbooks chapter via Binder. Simply navigate your mouse to the top right corner of the book chapter you are viewing and click on the rocket ship icon, (see figure below), and be sure to select “launch Binder”. After a moment you should be presented with a notebook that you can interact with. I.e. you’ll be able to execute and even change the example programs. You’ll see that the code cells have no output at first, until you execute them by pressing {kbd}Shift+{kbd}Enter. Complete details on how to interact with a live Jupyter notebook are described in Getting Started with Jupyter.

Running on Your Own Machine

If you are interested in running this material locally on your computer, you will need to follow this workflow:

(Replace "cookbook-example" with the title of your cookbooks)

1. Clone the https://github.com/ProjectPythia/cookbook-example repository:

bash git clone https://github.com/ProjectPythia/cookbook-example.git

1. Move into the cookbook-example directory bash cd cookbook-example
2. Create and activate your conda environment from the environment.yml file bash conda env create -f environment.yml conda activate cookbook-example
3. Move into the notebooks directory and start up Jupyterlab bash cd notebooks/ jupyter lab