A perspective on climate model hierarchies
Abstract
To understand Earth's climate, climate modelers employ a hierarchy of climate models spanning a wide spectrum of complexity and comprehensiveness. This essay, inspired by the World Climate Research Programme's recent "Model Hierarchies Workshop," attempts to survey and synthesize some of the current thinking on climate model hierarchies, especially as presented at the workshop. We give a few formal descriptions of the hierarchy and survey the various ways it is used to generate, test, and confirm hypotheses. We also discuss some of the pitfalls of contemporary climate modeling, and how the "elegance" advocated for by Held (2005) has (and has not) been used to address them. We conclude with a survey of current activity in hierarchical modeling, and offer suggestions for its continued fruitful development.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Received 5 MAY 2017; Accepted 19 JUN 2017; Accepted article online 19 JUL 2017; Published online 22 AUG 2017. The authors wish to thank I. Held for inspiration, V. Balaji for initiative and encouragement, S. Bony for proposing the Model Hierarchies Workshop, the Working Group on Climate Modeling of the World Climate Research Programme for sponsoring it, and the organizers and sessions chairs for their efforts in bringing it to fruition. Thanks are also due to Robert Pincus at JAMES for encouraging us to turn a workshop report into a commentary, and to Chris Bretherton and Bjorn Stevens for generous and insightful reviews. Ming Zhao provided the plot for Figure 2, and Nathaniel Tarshish and Allison Wing provided valuable feedback during the revision process. A.S. is supported by a Junior Fellow award from the Simons Foundation.Attached Files
Published - Jeevanjee_et_al-2017-Journal_of_Advances_in_Modeling_Earth_Systems.pdf
Accepted Version - 1eb358f7bb2218ab707ae4db2ed73425d0d96e40e29deb382c15d2af2ffeaa00.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 79198
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170719-092532082
- Simons Foundation
- Created
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2017-07-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field