Photo: Sonja Wahl
Last week from 16.11.20-19.11.20 we held our virtual CHESS course on “State of the Art Weather and Climate modeling”. This course was initiated and organized by three PhD students from the University of Bergen and facilitated through CHESS.
The course was originally planned in May, afterwards postponed to November due to Covid19, just so we eventually had to take it online after all. BUT, we are happy to report that we were an engaged core group of about ten participants with some part-time listeners dropping in for specific lectures. The majority of participants came from University of Bergen but we also had two people joining from University of Oslo.
The course was structured in a patchwork style. Seven different lecturers from NORCE, NERSC, IMR, Met Norway and ETH Zurich provided us with very useful and targeted lectures in their respective field of expertise, centered around a better understanding of the design, use and potential pitfalls of numerical modeling. The main topics were :
● Model Philosophy
● Atmospheric Models / Weather Models
● Ocean Models
● Coupled Climate Models
● Model Verification
● Model Diagnostic
● Data Assimilation
All of the lecturers tried to engage with the participants as much as possible using the zoom chat, breakout groups and some even went for the adventure to try out hands-on exercises. This was generally appreciated by the participants, even though some network servers turned out to be very reluctant to cooperate.
On Wednesday, all lecturers and participants gathered for an online PICO session where the students could get help on their very own specific model questions.
We want to thank all participants and specifically the lecturers for engaging in this course and making it an online success.
The course organizers,
Nadine Steiger, Sonja Wahl and Marvin Kähnert