In studying these interactions, our group specializes in the application of hierarchical climate modeling: building a hierarchy of models of successively less complexity, until the phenomenon has been distilled down to it's essential elements. The more complex models aim to simulate the phenomena, while the simpler models allow theoretical understanding. Many climate research groups make some use of hierarchical modeling; a particular concern of this group is to practice it systematically and attempt to make the derivation of the simpler and intermediate complexity members of the hierarchy as clean as possible.