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Free Online Climate Textbook

The first version of the online textbook, “Introduction to Climate Dynamics and Climate Modelling,” by H. Goosse, P.Y. Barriat, W. Lefebvre, M.F. Loutre, and V. Zunz, and published by the Universite Catholique de Louvain is now available.

http://www.climate.be/textbook

The reader should be able to understand the dominant causes of past climate change and to critically evaluate the projections of climate change over the next centuries or millennia. The book is also intended to give the student the bases to understand how climate models are built and how they could be used to make quantitative estimates of climate variability and climate change, as well as to illustrate how models could be used to understand the most important concepts of climate science.

Managing Papers and Sources

If you author scientific publications using LaTeX and OS X, there is a useful tool chain you should know about. Even if you write non-scientific papers in MS Word on Windows you might find something useful in this post. If you don’t write, or you already use Zotero, BibDesk, zot2bib, and LaTeXiT or EquationEditor, then you should probably skip this post.

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Sci Viz

I'm finally home from a wonderful week-long trip to Minneapolis and Madison. A group of ANDRILL and ARISE people met in Minneapolis to discuss scientific education. This involved spending time playing with a Geowall, mini golf in the science museum of Minnesota Big Back Yard, and learning about PSICAT and Corelyzer. We also watched a video of a Rain Table but did not get to play with it.

All this was in the context of ANDRILL and ARISE and meeting the team members and brainstorming about what interesting science education topics we will do on the ice. It is a great group and I'm excited to spend a few months with them in Antarctica.

The highlight of the trip was a morning in the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, a hydrology and fluid mechanics research center with the mission to, “conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water-resources, and energy-related problems”. I wish I had brought my camera so I could show some picture of all the streams and the Jurassic Tank they have inside the building…