Topic summary
Climate research
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Climatology.
Methods
Climate research is made difficult by the large scale, long time periods, and complex processes which govern climate. Climate is governed by physical principles which can be expressed as differential equations. These equations are coupled and nonlinear, so that approximate solutions are obtained by using numerical methods to create global climate models. Climate is sometimes modeled as a stochastic process but this is generally accepted as an approximation to processes that are otherwise too complicated to analyze.