Metrics

The Magic portal contains metrics, all calculated using ESMValTool recipes.

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a community-development that aims at improving diagnosing and understanding of the causes and effects of model biases and inter-model spread. The ESMValTool is open to both users and developers encouraging open exchange of diagnostic source code and evaluation results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) ensemble. This will facilitate and improve ESM evaluation beyond the state-of-the-art and aims at supporting the activities within CMIP and at individual modelling centers. We envisage running the ESMValTool routinely on the CMIP model output utilizing observations available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) in standard formats (obs4MIPs) or made available at ESGF nodes.

The goal is to develop a benchmarking and evaluation tool that produces well-established analyses as soon as model output from CMIP simulations becomes available, e.g., at one of the central repositories of the ESGF. This is realized through standard recipes that reproduce a certain set of diagnostics and performance metrics that have demonstrated its importance in benchmarking Earth System Models (ESMs) in a paper or assessment report, such as Chapter 9 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (Flato et al., 2013). The expectation is that in this way a routine and systematic evaluation of model results can be made more efficient, thereby enabling scientists to focus on developing more innovative methods of analysis rather than constantly having to “reinvent the wheel”.

In parallel to standardization of model output, the ESGF also hosts observations for Model Intercomparison Projects (obs4MIPs) and reanalyses data (ana4MIPs). obs4MIPs provides open access data sets of satellite data that are comparable in terms of variables, temporal and spatial frequency, and periods to CMIP model output (Taylor et al., 2012). The ESMValTool utilizes these observations and reanalyses from ana4MIPs plus additionally available observations in order to evaluate the models performance. In many diagnostics and metrics, more than one observational data set or meteorological reanalysis is used to assess uncertainties in observations.

—ESMValTool Documentation https://esmvaltool.readthedocs.io

For information on specific recipes used in this portal see the ESMValTool page: https://esmvaltool.readthedocs.io/en/latest/recipes/index.html