This week, I decided that I would build a climate model. This could have done this the easy way in excel spread sheets. But unfortunately, just building a climate model isn’t enough. I wanted to build a model of the changing climate since pre industrial times. For this, I would have to have data stretching back almost 200 years.
I suspect that there will be some degree of change. I remember the hottest day of summer being about 30°C. Now summer is reaching into the high 40s some days. There are also the extra added bonuses of extreme “once every 100 year” weather events happening every year since 2019. Including (but not limited to) drought, floods and fires.
Model Of The Changing Climate
Climate models can look many different ways. Sometimes they look like these shown here, bar graphs, scatter plots or what mine is going to look like, a line graph.
Climate Model from #ShowYourStripes.
Climate models are used to show what the climate of an area is. Depending on the data it uses, it can show many different things about an area’s climate. They can be used to see what an area’s average rainfall is in different months, see what temperature is should be in Spring, or calculate the global average temperature. My project is to find how much the maximum, minimum and precipitation (rainfall) in Sydney has changed since industrialisation (this is about 1850-1900).
That would be nearly 200 years of daily weather observations and over 63,000 lines of data. Using excel would probably make my computer explode. My options were to either: delete The Elderscrolls V Skyrim, or build a model from scratch in python. So I built a model from scratch in python.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, python is a coding language. It can be used to do things like make simple games, do maths and build climate models.
Learning to Code
So, I enrolled in a climate model building course on Cousera, run by University of Colorado Boulder. I already know a limited amount of python because I happened to get bored over the summer, but I had never actually built something like this.
The course showed me how to use python to sift through data and generate readable graphs. As well as how to get data into your python program. The course is from a US university, so it used US based data, and only looked at using a year’s worth of data to see what the climate is like in an area. But I didn’t see a reason why I couldn’t build one using Australian data, and use the same method to see how much the climate has changed in my own area over time.
I am still new to coding at this point. So creating my own python environment (a file on your computer to code into outside of Microsoft) and using libraries was an interesting challenge.
Building The Model
My target area was Sydney. Sydney is home to one of the oldest observatories in the country and has records dating back into the 1860s, making this the perfect site to get data from for my own model of the changing climate. Usually to see a climate pattern you need at least 30 years of data. But I wanted to see the change since pre industrial times.
Once I had completed the course, sorted out what libraries I would need (spoiler I started with two and ended up with five). I just had to, build it.
Leave a Reply