Authors: Robin Tokmakian Peter Challenor
Publish Date: 2013/03/07
Volume: 42, Issue: 3-4, Pages: 823-842
Abstract
This paper examines the uncertainty in the change in the heat content in the ocean component of a general circulation model We describe the design and implementation of our statistical methodology Using an ensemble of model runs and an emulator we produce an estimate of the full probability distribution function PDF for the change in upper ocean heat in an Atmosphere/Ocean General Circulation Model the Community Climate System Model v 3 across a multidimensional input space We show how the emulator of the GCM’s heat content change and hence the PDF can be validated and how implausible outcomes from the emulator can be identified when compared to observational estimates of the metric In addition the paper describes how the emulator outcomes and related uncertainty information might inform estimates of the same metric from a multimodel Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 ensemble We illustrate how to 1 construct an ensemble based on experiment design methods 2 construct and evaluate an emulator for a particular metric of a complex model 3 validate the emulator using observational estimates and explore the input space with respect to implausible outcomes and 4 contribute to the understanding of uncertainties within a multimodel ensemble Finally we estimate the most likely value for heat content change and its uncertainty for the model with respect to both observations and the uncertainty in the value for the input parametersThis work was completed with funding under NSF Grant No 0851065 We also thank the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge for allowing us to spend time at the institute where some of this research was completed We acknowledge the modeling groups the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison PCMDI and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling WGCM for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science US Department of Energy We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments which have improved the paper
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