S1: Diagnosis and Metrics in Climate Models

Principal investigators: Prof. Hans Burchard (Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde), Prof. Veronika Eyring (MARUM, University of Bremen), Prof. Thomas Jung (Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research/MARUM, University of Bremen), Dr. Martin Losch (Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research), Prof. Jens Rademacher (University of Hamburg), Prof. Bjorn Stevens (Max Planck Institute for Meterology Hamburg)

The S1 project is dedicated to advancing climate model evaluation by developing innovative diagnostics, enabling technologies, and comprehensive assessment methods. The primary goal is to assess how improved model consistency influences biases and the response to external forcing in climate simulations. S1 plays a central role in evaluating model developments proposed by the CRC and its various project areas, with a specific focus on two key climate models used by the German and European climate research community:ICON and IFS-FESOM.  

In its third phase, S1 will expand its work on new diagnostics and metrics, including spectral analysis tools on unstructured meshes and water mass transformation diagnostics, to enhance model quality assessment. Given the strong mathematical foundation required for some of these developments, mathematicians will be an integral part of the team

S1 will focus on the following core themes:  

- Development of spectral analysis tools for different mesh types, improving model diagnostics on unstructured grids.  
- Advancing diagnostics and metrics tailored for kilometre-scale models and common HEALPix meshes to enable cross-model comparisons.  
- Evaluating subgrid-scale processes, particularly their role in numerical mixing, overflows, and dense gravity currents, and their influence on model energetics.  
- Developing diapycnal water mass transformation diagnostics and applying them to study the meridional overturning circulation.  
- Assessing the performance of FESOM, ICON-o, and their coupled counterparts (IFS-FESOM and ICON) to identify strengths and areas for improvement.  
- Enabling technologies for efficient analysis of high-resolution model data, ensuring that diagnostics are memory-efficient and scalable.  
- Enhancing diagnostic frameworks, such as ESMValTool and pyfesom2, to facilitate seamless integration of new methodologies into broader research efforts.  
- Ensuring documentation, code management, and data governance, securing the long-term usability and accessibility of the developed tools. 

 

A key legacy of S1 will be the dissemination of easy-to-use, high-performance, and portable diagnostic software, ensuring that the tools developed within the project remain accessible and impactful for the broader scientific and modeling community. Furthermore, S1 will analyze simulations conducted both within the CRC and in external projects (e.g., CMIP, nextGEMS, and Destination Earth), ensuring that the outcomes of S1’s work contribute directly to international climate research efforts. Ultimately, S1 aims to synthesize the CRC’s impact on model quality and effectively communicate key findings to the scientific and modeling communities, fostering improvements in climate modeling and simulation capabilities.

FESOM model

One of the two ocean models used in the TRR181 project is FESOM (Finite-Element/volumE Sea ice-Ocean Model), which is part of the AWI-CM climate model of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).

FESOM is the only ocean model participating in CMIP6, that is formulated on an unstructured mesh. This allows scientists to flexibly increase horizontal resolution of the model in more energetically active areas of the ocean like the Gulf stream or Agulhas current. The resulting model resolves important details of ocean circulation, but is still computationally efficient.

FESOM ocean currents in Indian and Pacific oceans (100m)

The Earth’s energy budget and other funny aspects of the thermodynamics of the climate system

State-of-the-art climate models still struggle to reproduce a reasonably energetically consistent system, even though outstanding improvements have been achieved in the recent past.

Valerio Lembo, Postdoc in S1

The idea of this subproject is assessing the impact of introducing new numerical schemes and physical parametrizations developed in the TRR181 for the energy closure of state-of-the-art climate models. We provide diagnostic tools that allow for evaluation and intercomparison of climate models, starting from their outputted datasets.

It might sound trivial, expecting that the climate system, if in steady state, is also in thermodynamic equilibrium. This is at least what our studies of classical thermodynamics suggest. The problem is that the system constantly exchanges energy with its exterior, i.e. the outer space, and within its interior. In steady state conditions, the net exchange of energy with the exterior has to be null. In other words, the climate system is in thermodynamic equilibrium, once we averaged out the modulation of the solar energy input to an appropriately long timescale and all the energy exchanges occurring in its interior, shaping the solar “reflection” and the thermal energy output. This is a clear example of what is called a “non-equilibrium dissipative steady state thermodynamical system”.

State-of-the-art climate models still struggle to reproduce a reasonably energetically consistent system, even though outstanding improvements have been achieved in the recent past. This points to the very basic reasons for climate modeling, on one hand reflecting the lack of understanding of some processes involving energy exchanges and the limits of the discretization/truncation of the real world in finite dimension models, on the other hand preventing us from correctly evaluating the impact of the various forcings for reconstructed and projected climate change.

As TRR181, we are participating to the community effort called “ESMValTool”, whose aim is providing a set of standardized diagnostics for the evaluation of state-of-the-art and forthcoming multi-model ensembles. In our diagnostics, we try to address specifically the Earth’s energy budget and its atmospheric and oceanic components, and the atmospheric energy exchanges, including the Lorenz Energy Cycle, which describes the energy exchanges in the extratropical synoptic eddies. We also provide an estimate of the atmospheric material entropy production, i.e. the entropy production through irreversible processes, and the water mass budget, which is known to be one of the main sources of uncertainty for the modeled energy budget.

The diagnostic tool is currently being ported from version 1 to version 2 of ESMValTool, and will be hopefully soon publicly released. A report for the ESMValTool version 2 is being written, with contributions by all groups in the community, and another paper, focused on potential applications of the tool in various fields of climate science, will be submitted.

Metrics and Diagnostics for model improvements

The proper protocol and experiment setup for numerical experiments is crucial.

Nikolay Koldunov, Postdoc in S1

I am Nikolay Koldunov, Post Doc at MARUM and Alfred Wegener Institute. Since October I begin to work at Research Project S1: Diagnosis and Metrics in Climate Models. The main aim of the project is to integrate and synthesize work done in other parts of the TRR181. In particular we will provide metrics and diagnostics to help access the impact of model improvements suggested by TRR181 on quality of the climate models. One of the main challenges is to create model diagnostics that would not only quantify improvements, but also allow to clearly identify the cause of changes in model behavior. In this respect the proper protocol and experiment setup for numerical experiments is crucial and its development will be important part of my work. The resulting diagnostics will become available for the wider research community through the ESMValTool, that is going to be one of the main instruments of model analysis for the CMIP6 project.