What is numerical modeling?
Excerpted from Lectures on Numerical Meteorology by Roger K. Smith and Wolfgang Ulrich (1998): The story goes that Wilhelm Bjerknes in 1904 was the first to point out in that the future state of the atmosphere could be predicted by integrating the partial differential equations that govern the behaviour of the atmosphere, using as initial fields the observed state of the atmosphere at a particular time. However, the equations are too complicated for analytic solutions to be found and one must resort to numerical methods. We refer now to such integrations as numerical weather prediction, commonly abbreviated NWP. When numerical integrations of the equations are carried out with fictitious initial fields, they are referred to as numerical simulations.
