ARM Diagnostics for Climate Model Evaluation

A Python-based metrics and diagnostics package is currently being developed to facilitate the use of long-term, high-frequency measurements from the ARM Facility in evaluating the regional climate simulation of clouds, radiation, and precipitation. This metrics and diagnostics package computes climatological means of targeted climate model simulation and generates tables and plots for comparing the model simulation with ARM observational data. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model data sets are also included in the package to enable model intercomparison (Zhang et al. 2018). The mean of the CMIP model can serve as a reference for individual models.

The evaluated physical quantities include cloud fraction, temperature, relative humidity, cloud liquid water path, total column water vapor, precipitation, sensible and latent heat fluxes, and radiative fluxes, with plan to extend to more fields, such as aerosol and microphysics properties. Process-oriented diagnostics focusing on individual cloud-and precipitation-related phenomena are also being developed for the evaluation and development of specific model physical parameterizations.

The evaluated physical quantities include cloud fraction, temperature, relative humidity, cloud liquid water path, total column water vapor, precipitation, sensible and latent heat fluxes, and radiative fluxes, with plan to extend to more fields, such as aerosol and microphysics properties. Process-oriented diagnostics focusing on individual cloud-and precipitation-related phenomena are also being developed for the evaluation and development of specific model physical parameterizations.

ARM Diag v1 with basic sets of diagnostics is now publicly available. The figure below shows the main html page hosting the results. The data files including observation and CMIP5 model data are available through the ARM Data Archive. The analytical codes to calculate and visualize the diagnostics results are placed via repository (arm-gcm-diagnostics) at github. For more details, please refer to One-page description and Technical Report for the ARM data-oriented diagnostics package (ARMDIAG).

Reference:
Zhang C, S Xie, S Klein, H Ma, S Tang, K Van Weverberg, C Morcrette, and J Petch. 2018. "CAUSES: Diagnosis of the Summertime Warm Bias in CMIP5 Climate Models at the ARM Southern Great Plains Site." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 123(6), doi:10.1002/2017JD027200.

If you have any questions regarding this data product, please contact Cheng Tao (tao4@llnl.gov) or Chengzhu Zhang (zhang40@llnl.gov).