U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This three-day residence training course provides advanced knowledge in climate modeling, downscaling, attribution of extreme weather and water events to climate, and approaches and tools for developing local climate studies.

This module explains how climate models work. Because the modeling of both weather and climate share some similarities, the content throughout this module compares and contrasts the two, explaining how and why climate models differ from weather models. The module discusses how models are built to simulate climate and generate the statistics that describe it, and concludes with a discussion of how models are tuned and tested.

The module presents statistical evidence that demonstrates the impact that climate variability has on weather, explains predictability on time scales from weeks to month and seasons in the future, and the probabilistic nature of climate variability impact on daily weather predictions.