Syllabus
Past climates:
A brief survey of Earth's history, geological timescale, evolution of the atmosphere.
Methods of paleoclimatic reconstructions.
Information on past climates with emphasis on holocene and most recent climate.
Mechanisms of climate changes:
External causes (Milankovitch hypothesis, solar luminosity variations, other external factors). Internal factors, volcanic eruptions, changes in distribution of land and ocean.
Feedbacks in climate system, internal climate variability, chaotic nature.
Changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, carbon cycle.
Emission scenarios.
International activities.
Climate modeling:
Energy balance models, radiative-convective models.
Global climate model, structure, parametrizations, sensitivity
Experiments with climate models.
Downscaling methods and regional climate models.
Validation of model outputs.
Projections of future climate changes:
Sources of uncertainties in climate model outputs.
Emission scenarios and evolution of other forcings.
Climate change scenario construction.
Annotation
The course introduces topics related to climate changes on various temporal scales and their causes including possible anthropogenic forcing. Attention is also paid to climate models, their usage and methods for creation of climate change scenarios