A representative democracy to reduce interdependency in a multimodel ensemble

The collection of Earth system models available in the archive of phase 5 of CMIP (CMIP5) represents, at least to some degree, a sample of uncertainty of future climate evolution. The presence of duplicated code as well as shared forcing and validation data in the multiple models in the archive raises at least three potential problems: biases in the mean and variance, the overestimation of sample size, and the potential for spurious correlations to emerge in the archive because of model replication. Analytical evidence is presented to demonstrate that the distribution of models in the CMIP5 archive is not consistent with a random sample, and a weighting scheme is proposed to reduce some aspects of model codependency in the ensemble. A method is proposed for selecting diverse and skillful subsets of models in the archive, which could be used for impact studies in cases where physically consistent joint projections of multiple variables (and their temporal and spatial characteristics) are required.

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Author Sanderson, Benjamin
Knutti, Reto
Caldwell, Peter
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2015-07-01T00:00:00
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2023-08-18T18:43:01.045837
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:16774
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Sanderson, Benjamin, Knutti, Reto, Caldwell, Peter. (2015). A representative democracy to reduce interdependency in a multimodel ensemble. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d76m382j. Accessed 20 May 2025.

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