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Title: Statistical Emulation of Climate Model Projections Based on Precomputed GCM Runs*

Journal Article · · Journal of Climate
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [3];  [4];  [3]
  1. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States); King Abdullah Univ. of Science and Technology, Thuwal (Saudi Arabia)
  2. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States); Univ. of Adelaide, Adelaide (Australia)
  3. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States)
  4. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

The authors describe a new approach for emulating the output of a fully coupled climate model under arbitrary forcing scenarios that is based on a small set of precomputed runs from the model. Temperature and precipitation are expressed as simple functions of the past trajectory of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and a statistical model is fit using a limited set of training runs. The approach is demonstrated to be a useful and computationally efficient alternative to pattern scaling and captures the nonlinear evolution of spatial patterns of climate anomalies inherent in transient climates. The approach does as well as pattern scaling in all circumstances and substantially better in many; it is not computationally demanding; and, once the statistical model is fit, it produces emulated climate output effectively instantaneously. In conclusion, it may therefore find wide application in climate impacts assessments and other policy analyses requiring rapid climate projections.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1395163
Journal Information:
Journal of Climate, Journal Name: Journal of Climate Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 27; ISSN 0894-8755
Publisher:
American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (14)

A spatial-dependent model for climate emulation journal October 2016
Axially symmetric models for global data: A journey between geostatistics and stochastic generators: Axially symmetric models journal January 2019
On the Relationship Between GHGs and Global Temperature Anomalies: Multi-level Rolling Analysis and Copula Calibration journal May 2018
Timescale for Detecting the Climate Response to Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering journal February 2019
Deep learning and process understanding for data-driven Earth system science journal February 2019
Interaction between top-down and bottom-up control in marine food webs journal February 2017
Compressing an Ensemble With Statistical Models: An Algorithm for Global 3D Spatio-Temporal Temperature journal July 2016
Compression and Conditional Emulation of Climate Model Output journal January 2018
Emulation of a process-based estuarine hydrodynamic model journal April 2018
On the relationship between GHGs and Global Temperature Anomalies: Multi-level rolling analysis and Copula calibration text January 2017
An open-access CMIP5 pattern library for temperature and precipitation: Description and methodology posted_content January 2017
An open-access CMIP5 pattern library for temperature and precipitation: description and methodology journal January 2017
PALEO-PGEM v1.0: a statistical emulator of Pliocene–Pleistocene climate journal January 2019
A simple object-oriented and open-source model for scientific and policy analyses of the global climate system – Hector v1.0 journal January 2015

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Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
General circulation models
Model output statistics
Statistics