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Observational challenges in evaluating climate models

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 940–941 (2013)Cite this article

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To the Editor —

Activities such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)1 have revolutionized climate modelling in terms of our ability to compare models and to process information about climate projections and their uncertainties. The evaluation of models against observations is now considered a key component of multimodel studies. Although there are a number of outstanding scientific issues surrounding model evaluation, notably the open question of how to link model performance to future projections, here we highlight a specific but growing problem — that of uncertainties in the observational data that are used to evaluate the models. We illustrate this using an example obtained from studies of the South Asian monsoon2, but we believe the problem is a generic one that arises in many different areas of climate model evaluation and requires some attention by the community.

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Figure 1: An example of the evaluation of the ability of the CMIP5 models to simulate aspects of the South Asian Monsoon.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the joint NERC/MoES SAPRISE project (NE/I022841/1). A.T. was also supported by a NERC Fellowship (NE/H015655/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Engineering, Mathetmatics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QF, UK

    Mat Collins

  2. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Delhi, 110016, India

    Krishna AchutaRao

  3. Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, 411008, India

    Karumuri Ashok

  4. Indian Centre for Climate and Societal Impacts Research, Ahmedabad, 380009, India

    Satyendra Bhandari & Rohit Srivastava

  5. National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida, 201309, India

    Ashis K. Mitra & Satya Prakash

  6. National Centre for Atmospheric Science-Climate, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6BB, UK

    Andrew Turner

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  1. Mat Collins
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  2. Krishna AchutaRao
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Correspondence to Mat Collins.

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Collins, M., AchutaRao, K., Ashok, K. et al. Observational challenges in evaluating climate models. Nature Clim Change 3, 940–941 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2012

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