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Crossbreeding CMIP6 Earth System Models With an Emulator for Regionally Optimized Land Temperature Projections
Author(s) -
Beusch Lea,
Gudmundsson Lukas,
Seneviratne Sonia I.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2019gl086812
Subject(s) - earth system science , environmental science , climatology , modular design , coupled model intercomparison project , climate model , meteorology , climate change , computer science , geology , physics , oceanography , operating system
The newest generation of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) exhibits a larger spread in temperature projections at the end of the 21st century than the previous generation. Here, a modular Earth System Model emulator is used to evaluate the realism of the warming signal in CMIP6 models on both global and regional scales, by comparing their global trends and regional response parameters to observations. Subsequently, the emulator is employed to derive large “crossbred” multimodel initial‐condition ensembles of regionally optimized land temperature projections by combining observationally constrained global mean temperature trend trajectories with observationally constrained local parameters. In the optimized ensembles, the warmest temperature projections are generally reduced and for the coolest projections both higher and lower values are found, depending on the region. The median shows less changes in large parts of the globe. These regional differences highlight the importance of a geographically explicit evaluation of Earth System Model projections.