Mention the discipline of computer modeling to most people and they’ll think of math and graphs and technical detail complicated enough to cause a migraine.
But talk with Eric DeWeaver, a climatologist with UW-Madison, about the computer climate models that are his specialty and soon you will be imagining polar bears on the blinding ice of the Arctic oceans. Bears plunging off the edges of ice floes in search of seals. Bears embarked on epic journeys of thousands of miles across jumbled pack ice and through frigid northern waters. Bears raising their young in snowy dens.