General Circulation Models (GCMs) are a class of computer-driven models for weather forecasting, understanding climate and projecting climate change, where they are commonly called Global Climate Models.

A global climate model or general circulation model aims to describe climate behavior by integrating a variety of fluid-dynamical, chemical, or even biological equations that are either derived directly from physical laws (e.g.

Newton's law) or constructed by more empirical means.

There are both atmospheric GCMs (AGCMs) and ocean GCMs (OGCMs).

An AGCM and an OGCM can be coupled together to form an atmosphere-ocean coupled general circulation model (AOGCM).

With the addition of other components (such as a sea ice model or a land model), the AOGCM becomes the basis for a full climate model.

Within this structure, different variations can exist, and their varying response to climate change may be studied. A recent trend in GCMs is to extend them to become Earth system models, that include such things as submodels for atmospheric chemistry or a carbon cycle model to better predict changes in carbon dioxide concentrations resulting from changes in emissions.

In addition this approach allows feedback between these systems to be taken into account.

For example, Chemistry-Climate models allow the possible effects of climate change on the recovery of the ozone hole to be studied.

For more information about the topic Global climate model, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Climate model — Climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice. They are used for a variety of ...  > read more

Consensus of scientists regarding global warming — The IPCC Third Assessment Report is a product of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is based in Geneva Switzerland, and was ...  > read more

Numerical weather prediction — Numerical weather prediction is the science of predicting the weather using "models" of the atmosphere and computational techniques. Manipulating the ...  > read more

Carbon cycle — The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged between the biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere of the Earth. ...  > read more

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