Practice and philosophy of climate model tuning across six US modeling centers

Schmidt, Gavin A.; Bader, David; Donner, Leo J.; Elsaesser, Gregory S.; Golaz, Jean-Christophe; Hannay, Cecile; Molod, Andrea; Neale, Richard B.; Saha, Suranjana

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3207-2017

Articles | Volume 10, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3207-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3207-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 9

Review and perspective paper

|

01 Sep 2017

Review and perspective paper |

| 01 Sep 2017

Practice and philosophy of climate model tuning across six US modeling centers

Gavin A. Schmidt, David Bader, Leo J. Donner, Gregory S. Elsaesser, Jean-Christophe Golaz, Cecile Hannay, Andrea Molod, Richard B. Neale, and Suranjana Saha

Download

Final revised paper (published on 01 Sep 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 14 Feb 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

SC1: 'Executive Editor Comment on "Practice and philosophy of climate model tuning across six U.S. modeling centers"', Astrid Kerkweg, 24 Feb 2017
RC1: 'Referee comment on Schmidt et al. 2017', Steven Sherwood, 28 Feb 2017
RC2: 'Referee comment on 'Practice and philosophy of climate model tuning across six U.S. modeling centers' by Gavin Schmidt et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Mar 2017
AC1: 'Response to reviewers', Gavin A. Schmidt, 19 May 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Gavin A. Schmidt on behalf of the Authors (19 May 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 May 2017) by James Annan

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Jun 2017)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (28 Jun 2017) by James Annan

AR by Gavin A. Schmidt on behalf of the Authors (17 Jul 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Jul 2017) by James Annan

AR by Gavin A. Schmidt on behalf of the Authors (24 Jul 2017)

Short summary

The development of coupled ocean atmosphere climate models is a complex process that inevitably includes multiple calibration steps (sometimes called tuning). Tuning uses degrees of freedom allowed by uncertainties in model approximations to modify parameters to make the simulation better align with some selected observed target(s). We describe how these tuning targets, parameters, and philosophy vary across six US modeling centers in order to increase the transparency of the practice.