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ppharris edited this page Apr 17, 2020 · 4 revisions

Overview

This repository provides code for calculating several diagnostics useful for evaluating land-atmosphere interactions in climate models. These diagnostics were developed or used by the PORCELAIN project. This work and its contributors were supported by the UK-China Research & Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) China as part of the Newton Fund.

The diagnostics provided by this tool currently are,

  1. Terrestrial Coupling Index between soil moisture and land surface heat fluxes, based on Dirmeyer (2011).
  2. Relative Warming Rate between land surface and near surface air temperatures during dry spells, based on Gallego-Elvira et al (2019).
  3. Hot day occurrence, which looks at the frequency of temperature extremes as a function of antecedent precipitation.

These diagnostics are implemented as recipes to ESMValTool version 2 (Righi et al, 2020), so they can be run on CMIP5 and CMIP6 model outputs, or on any CMOR-compliant NetCDF files. The diagnostics are written in Python 3; they are not compatible with Python 2.7.

Installation and running

  1. Install ESMValTool. These recipes have been developed using the most recent beta release of ESMValTool v2.0.0b3 and may not work with later versions. We recommend installing ESMValTool from source into a Conda virtual environment.

    1. Clone the ESMValTool repository and checkout the version of your choosing:

      $ git clone https://github.com/ESMValGroup/ESMValTool.git
      $ cd ESMValTool
      $ git checkout v2.0.0b3
      
    2. Use the file environment.yml to install the ESMValTool dependencies, but not ESMValTool itself, in a new Conda environment:

      $ conda env create -f ./environment.yml -n esmval
      
    3. Install ESMValTool in the new Conda environment from your local source:

      $ conda activate esmval
      (esmval) $ pip install .
      
  2. Clone the Porcpy repository to a different directory:

    (esmval) $ cd ..
    (esmval) $ git clone https://github.com/ppharris/porcpy.git
    
  3. Create a ESMValTool user configuration file. Start by copying the example file config-user-example.yml from the ESMValTool source directory and edit as appropriate. You'll almost certainly need to change the values of rootpath and drs, which describe the location of the input data on your system, and the location of the work and output files output_dir. Note that the intermediate work files can be large, so make sure this is somewhere with sufficient disk space.

  4. Edit the recipe to include the models, experiments and time periods of interest. More information on this is given on the individual pages for each diagnostic.

  5. Run ESMValTool to calculate the diagnostic:

    (esmval) $ esmvaltool -c config-user.yml porcpy/recipes/recipe_tci.yml
    

References

  • Dirmeyer (2011) The terrestrial segment of soil moisture–climate coupling, Geophys. Res. Letts., 38(16), https://doi.org/10.1029/2011GL048268.

  • Gallego‐Elvira et al (2019) Evaluation of Regional‐Scale Soil Moisture‐Surface Flux Dynamics in Earth System Models Based on Satellite Observations of Land Surface Temperature, Geophys. Res. Letts., 46(10), (5480-5488), https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL082962.

  • Righi et al (2020) Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) v2.0 – technical overview, Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 1179–1199, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-1179-2020.