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An extensible perturbed parameter ensemble for the Community Atmosphere Model version 6

Journal Article · · Geoscientific Model Development (Online)
 [1];  [2];  [1];  [3];  [4];  [1];  [4];  [5];  [5]
  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States)
  2. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States); Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  3. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States). Scripps Inst. of Oceanography
  4. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States); NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies (GISS), New York, NY (United States)
  5. Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
This paper documents the methodology and preliminary results from a perturbed parameter ensemble (PPE) technique, where multiple parameters are varied simultaneously and the parameter values are determined with Latin hypercube sampling. This is done with the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 (CAM6), the atmospheric component of the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2). We apply the PPE method to CESM2–CAM6 to understand climate sensitivity to atmospheric physics parameters. The initial simulations vary 45 parameters in the microphysics, convection, turbulence and aerosol schemes with 263 ensemble members. These atmospheric parameters are typically the most uncertain in many climate models. Control simulations and targeted simulations to understand climate forcing due to aerosols and fast climate feedbacks are analyzed. The use of various emulators is explored in the multi-dimensional space mapping input parameters to output metrics. Parameter impacts on various model outputs, such as radiation, cloud and aerosol properties, are evaluated. Machine learning is also used to probe optimal parameter values against observations. Our findings show that PPE is a valuable tool for climate uncertainty analysis. Furthermore, by varying many parameters simultaneously, we find that many different combinations of parameter values can produce results consistent with observations, and thus careful analysis of tuning is important. The CESM2–CAM6 PPE is publicly available and extensible to other configurations to address questions of other model processes in the atmosphere and other model components (e.g., coupling to the land surface).
Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
2539904
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA--190726
Journal Information:
Geoscientific Model Development (Online), Journal Name: Geoscientific Model Development (Online) Journal Issue: 21 Vol. 17; ISSN 1991-9603
Publisher:
Copernicus Publications, EGUCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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