W1. Importance of simulation

Importance of simulation

Environmental Modeling

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Importance of the simulation

The first question we must make ourselves is why do we need to do environmental modeling, and the answer is that we do it for basically two reasons:

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We can do modeling to understand how the basic principles in any certain aspect of environment are working.

Sometimes we can obtain data from the environment, but we still do not understand what are the principles behind the data that we have gathered.

Think about this...

All the environmental modelers should have in mind that no matter how good a model or how accurate the results of the model are, maybe the model is not same as the reality.

What a model is?

Most of the times environmental modeling is not used to make a perfect model but to make a useful model. A useful model can be defined as a model with acceptable error in its output but logically appropriate and it will be computationally not challenging (feasible) that means it will be easy to compute and to run.

The models we use are very simplified because environment is very complex.

When it comes to environmental modeling, we have to understand that it is very important to decide the scope of our model. Since the model is not a perfect replica of reality of our environmental systems, it is an abstraction or in some cases a generalization of what is happening in reality, we have to define what specific part of environmental processes we are targeting.

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A model is basically a simplified map of the reality which can help us understand how the system is behaving and how the system might respond to other interventions. A model is not a perfect map, it’s a very simplified representation of the phenomena especially with environmental conditions in environmental systems.

In these cases we use empirical formula but once we understand the theory we can predict the impact of human interventions and human behavior in the studied environment.

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To understand the effect of human behavior or activites on the environmental processes

This is very important as our world goes through climate crisis as we suffer through widespread and almost catastrophic levels of environmental pollution throughout the world. Nowadays there is all over the world environmental destruction that has been partly predicted by models that were run many decades earlier. As a result of this situation, we want to do modeling to understand how our current activities affect the climate adaptation and removal of pollution or pollutants in the environment and what consequences will have on the environment in the upcoming future.

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Pure research reason.

We have a research question, and we need to answer it, or let’s say we have a problem and we want to research a solution and then notice or calculate the possible impact of our proposed solutions.