Description
The length includes figures, with no appendices and for a fontsize of 12, single-spaced. It should include:
1. A review of the paper that is assigned to you, explaining what the study is about, what its main conclusions are and how they were arrived at. You may wish to also discuss the wider implications of the paper or the impact it has had on later work.
2. A description of the results from your own numerical experiments in which you reproduce some of the results from the paper in the form of your own figures. Focus on what you regard as the key results. All three papers are explicit enough that it is possible for you to redo some calculations. You may wish to also plot the output from the model in a different way if it helps elucidate what is going on, or present results from other experiments you perform using the model, beyond those in the original paper.
Such an approach is typical of the research process itself: you read the literature, you understand it and report on it, you reproduce some of it and then you go from there with your own new ideas and publish a new paper. At the beginning there is always a key problem and some interesting questions.
You have a lot of flexibility in this assignment in that there are no specific instructions as to which specific figures you have to plot or what kind of code you need to write. Moreover, you are free to use any programming or plotting environment you wish to reproduce the model from the original paper (Matlab, Python, Excel, Fortran etc., which ever you are most comfortable with but providing they can do the job). As in a scientific paper, you should not include program source code or tabled data files. You need to convince yourselves – as well as me – that what you have coded is correct.
2 Assessment criteria
The criteria that will be considered in marking are:
Presentation: scientific and concise writing style, appropriate sectioning, appropriate use and de- sign of figures/tables with suitable captions and appropriate use of references
1
Literature review: sensible selection of material, understanding of material, critical interpretation and wider context.
Your calculations: clear method, reproduction of selected paper results, interpretation of results and imagination in performing calculations beyond those in paper.
What to do (Task):
Simplified vorticity equations. The variables in this system are amplitudes for sines and cosines, so it is possible to build up 2D pictures in physical space, as you have the time evolution of the coefficients – denoted by A, F, and G in the paper. You might focus on eq. 29, and may disregard the rather technical derivation of these equations. Lorenz (1960) showed that these are solvable analytically, but proposed to solve them numerically. It is straightforward for you to work with the equations for A, F and G in any programming language. Make sure you can reproduce figures like his Fig. 1 (you will need to be confident you can produce 2D contour plots of stream function calculated by applying eq. 14 to the three coefficients).
This is the paper by Lorenz 1960:
http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Maximum_Simplification_1960.pdf