Climate Modeling and Bifurcation

TL;DR

This paper introduces simple climate models with bifurcation analysis to help undergraduates understand potential climate shifts like ice ages or Venus-like conditions, supported by interactive MATLAB tools.

Contribution

It provides an educational framework with basic models and MATLAB programs to explore climate bifurcations, filling a gap in undergraduate climate education.

Findings

Models can exhibit bifurcations to ice age or Venus-like climates.

Interactive MATLAB tools enable exploration of parameter impacts.

Educational resource for understanding climate stability and transitions.

Abstract

Many papers and monographs were written about the modeling the Earth climate and its variability. However there is still an obvious need for a module that presents the fundamentals of climate modeling to students at the undergraduate level. The present educational paper attempts to fill in this gap. To this end we collect in this paper the relevant climate data and present a simple zero and one dimensional models for the mean temperature of the Earth. These models can exhibit bifurcations from the present Earth climate to an ice age or a "Venus type of climate". The models are accompanied by Matlab programs which enable the user to change the models parameters and explore the impact that these changes might have on their predictions on Earth climate.