HR: 13:40h
AN: GC53A-01 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: The use of the Multi-model Ensemble in Probabilistic Climate Projections
AU: * Knutti, R
EM: reto.knutti@env.ethz.ch
AF: Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Universitaetstrasse 16, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland
AU: Tebaldi, C
EM: tebaldi@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, United States
AB: Recent coordinated efforts, in which numerous climate models have been run for a common set of experiments, have produced large datasets of projections of future climate for various scenarios. Those multi-model ensembles sample initial condition, parameter as well as structural uncertainties in the model design, and they have prompted a variety of approaches to quantify uncertainty in future climate in a probabilistic way. This overview presentation outlines the motivation for using multi-model ensembles, briefly discusses the methodologies published so far and compares their results for regional temperature projections. It discusses the challenges in interpreting multi-model results, caused by the lack of verification of climate projections, the problem of model dependence, bias and tuning as well as the difficulty in making sense of an "ensemble of opportunity".
DE: 0550 Model verification and validation
DE: 1626 Global climate models (3337, 4928)
DE: 1637 Regional climate change
DE: 3245 Probabilistic forecasting (3238)
DE: 3275 Uncertainty quantification (1873)
SC: Global Environmental Change [GC]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting