Being ‘fussy pedants’ for the sake of climate science

CEDA and NCAS scientists have been busy documenting the experiments that will be run by climate models all over the world for the next big Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). Their paper about the methodology they used to describe the CMIP6 experiments was published in GMD Discussions on Wednesday.

Charlotte Pascoe, Senior Data Scientist at CEDA, said “Our work is about being fussy pedants in the name of clarity for climate science. Our method for describing experiments, which we developed as part of the ES-DOC initiative, has helped those devising CMIP6 experiments to be clear about their goals and expected methodology, made it easier for those running experiments to know what was intended and will make it clearer for the end users of CMIP6 data to understand the experiments.”

However it’s not just about making the data clearer, this work will also save energy by identifying where experiments overlap. Charlotte said “Our documentation reveals inter-relationships between the CMIP6 experiments which have been exploited by ES-DOC to streamline the documentation burden on scientists and to identify potential energy savings in terms of CPU hours not used.”

This paper highlights the ‘behind the scenes’ work that CEDA are involved with that benefits the climate science community by streamlining future CMIP workflows and potentially saving energy along the way!

You can take a look at the paper here.

This figure from the paper shows an overview of the CMIP6 MIPs (purple) and their experiments (blue). A few core experiments such as the pre-industrial control (piControl), the historical experiment and the future scenario experiment ssp245 form part of the protocol for many of the MIPs.