---------- Python package for process-oriented climate modeling ----------

python setup.py install

or, if you are developing new code

python setup.py develop

climlab is a flexible engine for process-oriented climate modeling. It is based on a very general concept of a model as a collection of individual, interacting processes. climlab defines a base class called Process, which can contain an arbitrarily complex tree of sub-processes (each also some sub-class of Process). Every climate process (radiative, dynamical, physical, turbulent, convective, chemical, etc.) can be simulated as a stand-alone process model given appropriate input, or as a sub-process of a more complex model. New classes of model can easily be defined and run interactively by putting together an appropriate collection of sub-processes.

Most of the actual computation uses vectorized numpy array functions. It should run out-of-the-box on a standard scientific Python distribution. Future versions of climlab will provide hooks to compiled Fortran code for more numerically intensive processes.

Currently, climlab has out-of-the-box support and documented examples for

• 1D grey-radiation and radiative-convective single column models
• 1D diffusive energy balance models
• Seasonal and steady-state models
• orbital / insolation calculations.

The directory climlab/courseware/ contains a collection of IPython notebooks (*.ipynb) used for teaching some basics of climate science, and documenting use of the climlab package. These are self-describing, and should all run out-of-the-box once the package is installed, e.g:

ipython notebook Insolation.ipynb

The first versions of the code and notebooks were originally developed in winter / spring 2014 in support of an undergraduate course at the University at Albany. See the original course webpage at http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/brose/classes/ENV480_Spring2014/

The package and its API was completely redesigned around a truly object-oriented modeling framework in January 2015.

It will be used extensively for a graduate-level climate modeling course in Spring 2015: http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/brose/classes/ATM623_Spring2015/

This code is freely available under the MIT license. See the accompanying LICENSE file.