No Arabic abstract
Earth System Models (ESM) are important tools that allow us to understand and quantify the physical, chemical & biological mechanisms governing the rates of change of elements of the Earth System, comprising of the atmosphere, ocean, land, cryosphere and biosphere (terrestrial and marine) and related components. ESMs are essentially coupled numerical models which incorporate processes within and across the different Earth system components and are expressed as set of mathematical equations. ESMs are useful for enhancing our fundamental understanding of the climate system, its multi-scale variability, global and regional climatic phenomena and making projections of future climate change. In this chapter, we briefly describe the salient aspects of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology ESM (IITM ESM), that has been developed recently at the IITM, Pune, India, for investigating long-term climate variability and change with focus on the South Asian monsoon.
Multi-model ensembles provide a pragmatic approach to the representation of model uncertainty in climate prediction. However, such representations are inherently ad hoc, and, as shown, probability distributions of climate variables based on current-generation multi-model ensembles, are not accurate. Results from seasonal re-forecast studies suggest that climate model ensembles based on stochastic-dynamic parametrisation are beginning to outperform multi-model ensembles, and have the potential to become significantly more skilful than multi-model ensembles. The case is made for stochastic representations of model uncertainty in future-generation climate prediction models. Firstly, a guiding characteristic of the scientific method is an ability to characterise and predict uncertainty; individual climate models are not currently able to do this. Secondly, through the effects of noise-induced rectification, stochastic-dynamic parametrisation may provide a (poor mans) surrogate to high resolution. Thirdly, stochastic-dynamic parametrisations may be able to take advantage of the inherent stochasticity of electron flow through certain types of low-energy computer chips, currently under development. These arguments have particular resonance for next-generation Earth-System models, which purport to be comprehensive numerical representations of climate, and where integrations at high resolution may be unaffordable.
Large computer models are ubiquitous in the earth sciences. These models often have tens or hundreds of tuneable parameters and can take thousands of core-hours to run to completion while generating terabytes of output. It is becoming common practice to develop emulators as fast approximations, or surrogates, of these models in order to explore the relationships between these inputs and outputs, understand uncertainties and generate large ensembles datasets. While the purpose of these surrogates may differ, their development is often very similar. Here we introduce ESEm: an open-source tool providing a general workflow for emulating and validating a wide variety of models and outputs. It includes efficient routines for sampling these emulators for the purpose of uncertainty quantification and model calibration. It is built on well-established, high-performance libraries to ensure robustness, extensibility and scalability. We demonstrate the flexibility of ESEm through three case-studies using ESEm to reduce parametric uncertainty in a general circulation model, explore precipitation sensitivity in a cloud resolving model and scenario uncertainty in the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble.
Neural networks have become increasingly prevalent within the geosciences, although a common limitation of their usage has been a lack of methods to interpret what the networks learn and how they make decisions. As such, neural networks have often been used within the geosciences to most accurately identify a desired output given a set of inputs, with the interpretation of what the network learns used as a secondary metric to ensure the network is making the right decision for the right reason. Neural network interpretation techniques have become more advanced in recent years, however, and we therefore propose that the ultimate objective of using a neural network can also be the interpretation of what the network has learned rather than the output itself. We show that the interpretation of neural networks can enable the discovery of scientifically meaningful connections within geoscientific data. In particular, we use two methods for neural network interpretation called backwards optimization and layerwise relevance propagation, both of which project the decision pathways of a network back onto the original input dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, LRP has not yet been applied to geoscientific research, and we believe it has great potential in this area. We show how these interpretation techniques can be used to reliably infer scientifically meaningful information from neural networks by applying them to common climate patterns. These results suggest that combining interpretable neural networks with novel scientific hypotheses will open the door to many new avenues in neural network-related geoscience research.
We study the relationship between the El Ni~no--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian summer monsoon in ensemble simulations from state-of-the-art climate models, the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM) and the Community Earth System Model (CESM). We consider two simple variables: the Tahiti--Darwin sea-level pressure difference and the Northern Indian precipitation. We utilize ensembles converged to the systems snapshot attractor for analyzing possible changes (i) in the teleconnection between the fluctuations of the two variables, and (ii) in their climatic means. (i) With very high confidence, we detect an increase in the strength of the teleconnection, as a response to the forcing, in the MPI-ESM under historical forcing between 1890 and 2005, concentrated to the end of this period. We explain that our finding does not contradict instrumental observations, since their existing analyses regarding the nonstationarity of the teleconnection are either methodologically unreliable, or consider an ill-defined teleconnection concept. In the MPI-ESM we cannot reject stationarity between 2006 and 2099 under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5), and in a 110-year-long 1-percent pure CO2 scenario; neither can we in the CESM between 1960 and 2100 with historical forcing and RCP8.5. (ii) In the latter ensembles, the climatic mean is strongly displaced in the phase space projection spanned by the two variables. This displacement is nevertheless linear. However, the slope exhibits a strong seasonality, falsifying a hypothesis of a universal, emergent relationship between these two climatic means, excluding applicability in an emergent constraint.
Raylaigh-Benard convection is one of the most well-studied models in fluid mechanics. Atmospheric convection, one of the most important components of the climate system, is by comparison complicated and poorly understood. A key attribute of atmospheric convection is the buoyancy source provided by the condensation of water vapour, but the presence of radiation, compressibility, liquid water and ice further complicate the system and our understanding of it. In this paper we present an idealized model of moist convection by taking the Boussinesq limit of the ideal gas equations and adding a condensate that obeys a simplified Clausius--Clapeyron relation. The system allows moist convection to be explored at a fundamental level and reduces to the classical Rayleigh-Benard model if the latent heat of condensation is taken to be zero. The model has an exact, Rayleigh-number independent `drizzle solution in which the diffusion of water vapour from a saturated lower surface is balanced by condensation, with the temperature field (and so the saturation value of the moisture) determined self-consistently by the heat released in the condensation. This state is the moist analogue of the conductive solution in the classical problem. We numerically determine the linear stability properties of this solution as a function of Rayleigh number and a nondimensional latent-heat parameter. We also present a number of turbulent solutions.