Environmental Modeling: A Practical Introduction Review

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(More customer reviews)Environmental Modeling: A Practical Introduction by Mike Barnsley (CRC) Increasingly used to represent climatic, biogeochemical, and ecological systems, computer modeling has become an important tool that should be in every environmental professional's toolbox. Environmental Modeling: A Practical Introduction is just what it purports to be, a practical introduction to the various methods, techniques, and skills required for computerized environmental modeling. Exploring the broad arena of environmental modeling, the book demonstrates how to represent an environmental problem in conceptual terms, formalize the conceptual model using mathematical expressions, convert the mathematical model into a program that can be run on a desktop or laptop computer, and examine the results produced by the computational model.
Equally important, the book imparts skills that allow you to develop, implement, and experiment with a range of computerized environmental models. The emphasis is on active engagement in the modeling process rather than on passive learning about a suite of well-established models. The author takes a practical approach throughout, one that does not get bogged down in the details of the underlying mathematics and that encourages learning through "hands on" experimentation. He provides a set of-software tools and data sets that you can use to work through the various examples and exercises presented in each chapter, as well as presentational material and handouts for course tutors. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book discusses how computational models can be used to represent environmental systems and illustrates how such models improve understanding of the ways in which environmental systems function.
The initial motivation to write this book stemmed from the perception of a growing divide between the increasingly sophisticated computer-based models that are being developed to represent various aspects of Earth's environmental systems (including those pertaining to its climate, ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles and hydrological processes) and the ability of many undergraduate students, and even some graduate students, of the environmental sciences to engage constructively with these models. The aim of this book, therefore, is to provide a practical introduction to the various methods, techniques and skills involved in computerized environmental modeling, including (i) representing an environmental problem in conceptual terms (i.e., devel¬oping a conceptual model), (ii) formalizing the conceptual model using mathemati¬cal expressions (i.e., formulating a mathematical model), (iii) converting the math¬ematical model into a program that can be run on a desktop or a laptop computer (i.e., implementing a computational model) and (iv) examining the results produced by the computational model (i.e., visualizing the output from a model and checking the model's validity in comparison with observations of the target system).


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Increasingly used to represent climatic, biogeochemical, and ecological systems, computer modeling has become an important tool that should be in every environmental professional's toolbox. Environmental Modeling: A Practical Introduction is just what it purports to be, a practical introduction to the various methods, techniques, and skills required for computerized environmental modeling. Exploring the broad arena of environmental modeling, the book demonstrates how to represent an environmental problem in conceptual terms, formalize the conceptual model using mathematical expressions, convert the mathematical model into a program that can be run on a desktop or laptop computer, and examine the results produced by the computational model.
Equally important, the book imparts skills that allow you to develop, implement, and experiment with a range of computerized environmental models. The emphasis is on active engagement in the modeling process rather than on passive learning about a suite of well-established models. The author takes a practical approach throughout, one that does not get bogged down in the details of the underlying mathematics and that encourages learning through 'hands on" experimentation. He provides a set of software tools and data sets that you can use to work through the various examples and exercises presented in each chapter, as well as presentational material and handouts for course tutors. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book discusses how computational models can be used to represent environmental systems and illustrates how such models improve understanding of the ways in which environmental systems function.

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