General model evaluation

Overview

These recipes and diagnostics provide a basic climate model evaluation with observational data. This is especially useful to get an overview of the performance of a simulation. The diagnostics used here allow plotting arbitrary preprocessor output, i.e., arbitrary variables from arbitrary datasets.

Available recipes and diagnostics

Recipes are stored in recipes/model_evaluation

• recipe_model_evaluation_basics.yml

• recipe_model_evaluation_clouds_clim.yml

• recipe_model_evaluation_clouds_cycles.yml

• recipe_model_evaluation_precip_diurnal_cycle.yml

• recipe_model_evaluation_precip_hist.yml

• recipe_model_evaluation_precip_zonal.yml

Diagnostics are stored in diag_scripts/monitor/

• multi_datasets.py: Monitoring diagnostic to show multiple datasets in one plot (incl. biases).

• plot_histogram.py: Plotting of 1D histograms with precomputed histogram data (histogram preprocessor).

• hydrology/hour_of_max_precipitation.py: Calculating and plotting hour of maximum precipitation.

User settings

It is recommended to use a vector graphic file type (e.g., SVG) for the output format when running this recipe, i.e., run the recipe with the configuration options output_file_type: svg. Note that map and profile plots are rasterized by default. Use rasterize: false in the recipe to disable this.

Recipe settings

A list of all possible configuration options that can be specified in the recipe is given for each diagnostic individually (see links given for the available diagnostics in the previous section).

Variables

Any, but the variables’ number of dimensions should match the ones expected by each diagnostic (see links given for the available diagnostics in the previous section).

Example plots

Fig. 99 Global climatology of 2m near-surface air temperature.

Fig. 100 Global climatology of the shortwave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE).

Fig. 101 Time series of the global mean top-of-the-atmosphere net radiative flux.

Fig. 102 Zonal mean precipitation.

Fig. 103 Annual cycle of Southern Ocean total cloud cover.

Fig. 104 Diurnal cycle of Southeast Pacific total cloud cover.

Fig. 105 Histogram of precipitation rates from MPI-ESM1-2-HR and ERA5 reanalysis 3-hourly data over the Tropics (30°S-30°N) for the years 1979-1980.

Fig. 106 Hour of maximum precipitation from ERA5 in the tropics (30°S-30°N) for the months June, July, August 2000.