March 31, 2009
Possible PhD thoughts
After our weekly climate change brainstorming meeting, I have a couple thoughts about topics that would interest me as a PhD topic.
Inherent coupling in climate models: Climate models involve tightly coupled physical processes. How much is it possible to decouple the modules of a climate model?
Is it possible or useful to reverse-engineer requirements for a climate model based on its change history?
I’m sure there’s more – we haven’t really got to the verification/validation problems, and I’ve always been interested in testing. It’s nice to have a couple ideas I’d be happy working on, though. It helps me feel a little less like I’m drifting aimlessly, reading papers and trying to put ideas together.
I’m hoping to use my required courses to learn more about things I’d like to know. Right now I have:
Ontologies – I’m sure there’s a breadth course in that area that would be of interest.
Statistics – Just useful, and you can never understand statistics too well.
Numerical analysis/computation – certainly possibly to take for breadth.
???? – I’m sure I’m missing something. If not, well, I can always take a theory course. A little math is fun.
Carolyn's Computer Science Research Weblog 
Modularizing Climate Models | Serendipity said,
April 1, 2009 at 2:37 am
[…] models can be made more modular, to permit distributed development, and distributed execution. Carolyn has already blogged about some of these ideas. Here’s a little bit of history for this […]
stevesme said,
April 1, 2009 at 2:47 am
Carolyn – I’ve blogged a little about modularity (http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=196). Next up, I’m working on a piece about validation…