Keynote: Birgit Hassler (German Aerospace Centre DLR)
ESMValTool: Analyzing CMIP-style data made easy
When: 16:30 - 17:00
Abstract
The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) has been developed with the aim of taking model evaluation to the next level by facilitating analysis of many different ESM components, providing well-documented source code and scientific background of implemented diagnostics and metrics and allowing for traceability and reproducibility of results (provenance). This has been made possible by a lively and growing development community continuously improving the tool supported by multiple national and European projects. The latest major release (v2.0) of the ESMValTool has been officially introduced in August 2020 as a large community effort, and since then several additional smaller releases have followed.
Since it is designed to assess output from ESMs participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), ESMValTool expects input data to be formatted according to the CMOR (Climate Model Output Rewriter) standard. While this CMORization of model output is a quasi-standard for large model intercomparison projects like CMIP, this complicates the application of ESMValTool to non-CMOR-compliant data like native climate model output (i.e., the raw output directly provided by a climate model). In one of the recent versions of ESMValTool an extension was added that allows reading and processing native climate model output. This is implemented via a CMOR-like reformatting of the input data during runtime. This extension opens up the large collection of diagnostics provided by ESMValTool for these models. The latest improvements to ESMValTool focus on optimizing the memory efficiency when reading and processing input data, and the addition of new metrics to benchmark new model simulations against observations and other models (e.g. the suite of CMIP6 simulations).
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