Documenting numerical experiments in support of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6)

Pascoe, Charlotte; Lawrence, Bryan N.; Guilyardi, Eric; Juckes, Martin; Taylor, Karl E.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-2149-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-2149-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) Experimental...

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-2149-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 5

Model experiment description paper

|

06 May 2020

Model experiment description paper |

| 06 May 2020

Documenting numerical experiments in support of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6)

Charlotte Pascoe, Bryan N. Lawrence, Eric Guilyardi, Martin Juckes, and Karl E. Taylor

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Final revised paper (published on 06 May 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Jun 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Pascoe et al.', Ron Stouffer, 07 Jul 2019
AC1: 'Author reply to Ron Stouffer', Charlotte Pascoe, 01 Aug 2019
SC1: 'Review of Pascoe et al. - PN Edwards', Paul Edwards, 07 Aug 2019
- AC2: 'Initial response to Paul Edwards', Charlotte Pascoe, 04 Sep 2019
SC2: 'Comments from CMIP Panel and RFMIP members', Veronika Eyring, 08 Aug 2019
- AC3: 'Authors response to the comments from the CMIP panel', Charlotte Pascoe, 04 Sep 2019
AC4: 'Final comments from the authors in response to the combined comments from the reviewers', Charlotte Pascoe, 19 Sep 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Charlotte Pascoe on behalf of the Authors (25 Oct 2019) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Nov 2019) by Juan Antonio Añel

RR by Ron Stouffer (08 Nov 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

A Re-Review of “Designing and Documenting Experiments in CMIP6” by Pascoe et al.

General Comments

The paper is much improved. I believe a much larger audience can now understand and appreciate the various points made in the paper. That said there are still a few places of too much detail/jargon at least for me, so I did not comment on these with the exception of my comment on UML.

I also note as an aside that there should be an overall “scientific” oversight or review similar to that imposed by ES-DOCs on the MIPs. A strong oversight is one thing that got much harder to achieve in going to a distributed MIP system in CMIP6.
Nice paper. I strongly recommend its publication.

Detailed Comments

1. Section 1 – Much improved opening to paper. I have no specific suggestions except to say that the actual situation is actually worse than described. For example, often modelers cannot ingest forcings exactly as prescribed because the model generation/code can’t handle the detail or phenomena in the way conceived by the experiment designers. Unfortunately, similar problems more often occur in the output of variables. Modelers often make adhoc choices to fit model variables into the definitions provided by the WIP et al.

An additional big picture problem is that two models using identical “forcings” … say sulphate emissions or concentrations, do not have the same radiative forcing due to differences in the base state simulation of temperature and water vapor. Our community in general does not seem to appreciate this fact. We all pretend that using the same forcing yields the same radiative forcing.

2. Figure 3 caption – Is there a reference or user guide for UML? I assume most readers will have no idea what this is. More is needed to make it useful to the reader.

3. Page 11, L 21 - Some of these morphed to became entirely – English.

4. Page 12, L 4 – Type-o “CIMP”

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (07 Jan 2020)

ED: Publish as is (13 Jan 2020) by Juan Antonio Añel

AR by Charlotte Pascoe on behalf of the Authors (30 Jan 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

We present a methodology for documenting numerical experiments in the context of an information sharing ecosystem which allows the weather, climate, and earth system modelling community to accurately document and share information about their modelling workflow. We describe how through iteration with a range of stakeholders, we rationalized multiple sources of information and improved the clarity of experimental definitions for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6).