Authors: Karsten Steinhaeuser Anastasios A Tsonis
Publish Date: 2013/04/07
Volume: 42, Issue: 5-6, Pages: 1665-1670
Abstract
Until now climate model intercomparison has focused primarily on annual and global averages of various quantities or on specific components not on how well the general dynamics in the models compare to each other In order to address how well models agree when it comes to the dynamics they generate we have adopted a new approach based on climate networks We have considered 28 preindustrial control runs as well as 70 20thcentury forced runs from 23 climate models and have constructed networks for the 500 hPa surface air temperature SAT sea level pressure SLP and precipitation fields for each run We then employed a widely used algorithm to derive the community structure in these networks Communities separate “nodes” in the network sharing similar dynamics It has been shown that these communities or subsystems in the climate system are associated with major climate modes and physics of the atmosphere Tsonis AA Swanson KL Wang G J Clim 21 2990–3001 in 2008 Tsonis AA Wang G Swanson KL Rodrigues F da Fontura Costa L Clim Dyn 37 933–940 in 2011 Steinhaeuser K Ganguly AR Chawla NV Clim Dyn 39 889–895 in 2012 Once the community structure for all runs is derived we use a pattern matching statistic to obtain a measure of how well any two models agree with each other We find that with the possible exception of the 500 hPa field consistency for the SAT SLP and precipitation fields is questionable More importantly none of the models comes close to the community structure of the actual observations reality This is a significant finding especially for the temperature and precipitation fields as these are the fields widely used to produce future projections in time and in space
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