Articles | Volume 10, issue 9
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3207-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3207-2017
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

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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.
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