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Coarse-resolution climate and weather forecast models cannot accurately parameterize small-scale, nonlinear processes without accounting for subgrid-scale variability. To do so, some models integrate over the subgrid variability analytically. Although analytic integration methods are attractive, they can be used only with physical parameterizations that have a sufficiently simple functional form. Instead, this paper introduces a method to integrate subgrid variability using a type of Monte Carlo integration. The method generates subcolumns with suitable vertical correlations and feeds them into a microphysics parameterization. The subcolumn methodology requires little change to the parameterization source code and can be used with a wide variety of physical parameterizations. Our subcolumn generator is multivariate, which is important for physical processes that involve two or more hydrometeor species, such as accretion of cloud droplets by rain drops. In order to reduce sampling noise in the integrations, our subcolumn generator employs two variance-reduction methods, namely importance and stratified (Latin hypercube) sampling. For this reason, we name the subcolumn generator the Subgrid Importance Latin Hypercube Sampler (SILHS). This paper tests SILHS in interactive, single-column simulations of a marine stratocumulus case and a shallow cumulus case. The paper then compares simulations that use SILHS with those that use analytic integration. Although the SILHS solutions exhibit considerable noise from time step to time step, the noise is greatly damped in most of the timeaveraged profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) has vigorously responded to a number of the natural, scientific, and technological challenges and driving forces that have marked the 21st century thus far. This paper reviews the actions of the Union that were precipitated by disasters caused by natural hazard events, climatic and environmental changes, and important scientific advances, as well as the opportunities to support International Years and other cooperative programs. This period has also given rise to a number of structural changes within the Union. IUGG added an eighth association, the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences, and inaugurated the new categories of affiliate and honorary memberships, introduced new grants, science education, and recognition programs, and formed new Union commissions on climatic and environmental change, data and information, planetary sciences, and a working group on history. Electronic communication was welcomed as a cultural norm. Overall, the development of the scientific landscape in the 21st century and a healthy future for the Union requires emphasis on fundamental Earth and space sciences as well as on transdisciplinary science to resolve urgent problems of society. IUGG will continue to evolve throughout the coming decades in step with the changing world of science and its international organizations, by responding to challenging problems as they arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Earth System Model version 3 (NESM v3) has been developed, aiming to provide a numerical modeling platform for cross-disciplinary earth system studies, project future Earth's climate and environment changes, as well conduct subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction. While the previous model version NESM v1 simulates well the internal modes of climate variability, it has no vegetation dynamics and suffers considerable radiative energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere and surface, resulting in large biases in the global mean surface air temperature, which limit its utility to simulate past and project future climate changes. The NESM v3 upgraded the atmospheric and land surface model components and improved physical parameterization and conservation of coupling variables. Here we describe the new version's basic features and how the major improvements were made. We demonstrate the v3 model's fidelity and suitability to address the global climate variability and change issues. The 500-year PI experiment shows negligible trends in the net heat flux at the top of atmosphere and the Earth surface. Consistently, the simulated global mean surface air temperature, land surface temperature and sea surface temperature (SST) are all in a quasi-equilibrium state. The conservation of global water is demonstrated by the stable evolution of the global mean precipitation, sea surface salinity (SSS) and sea water salinity. The sea ice extents (SIEs), as a major indication of high latitude climate, also maintain a balanced state. The simulated spatial patterns of the mean outgoing longwave radiation, SST, precipitation, SSS fields are realistic, but the model suffers from a cold bias in the North Atlantic, a warm bias in the Southern Ocean and associated deficient Antarctic sea ice area, as well as a delicate sign of the double ITCZ syndrome. The estimate radiative forcing of quadrupling carbon dioxide is about 7.24 W m-2, yielding a climate sensitivity feedback parameter of -0.98 W m-2 K-1, and the equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3.69 K. The transient climate response from the 1 pct/year increasing CO2 experiment is 2.16 K. The model's performance on internal modes and responses to external forcing during the historical period will be documented in an accompanying paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple models can play pivotal roles in the quantification and framing of uncertainties surrounding climate change and sea-level rise. They are computationally efficient, transparent, and easy to reproduce. These qualities also make simple models useful for the characterization of risk. Simple model codes are increasingly distributed as open source, as well as actively shared and guided. Alas, computer codes used in the geosciences can often be hard to access, run, modify (e.g., with regards to assumptions and model components), and review. Here, we describe the simple model framework BRICK (Building blocks for Relevant Ice and Climate Knowledge) v0.2 and its underlying design principles. The paper adds detail to an earlier published model setup and discusses the inclusion of a land water storage component. The framework largely builds on existing models and allows for projections of global mean temperature as well as regional sea levels and coastal flood risk. BRICK is written in R and Fortran. BRICK gives special attention to the model values of transparency, accessibility, and flexibility in order to mitigate the above-mentioned issues while maintaining a high degree of computational efficiency. We demonstrate the flexibility of this framework through simple model intercomparison experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that BRICK is suitable for risk assessment applications by using a didactic example in local flood risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models used to investigate impacts of climatic changes on spatio-temporal vegetation dynamics need to balance required accuracy with computational feasibility. To enhance the computational efficiency of these models, upscaling methods are required that maintain key fine-scale processes influencing vegetation dynamics. In this paper, an adjustable method – the dynamic two-layer classification concept (D2C) – for the upscaling of time- and space-discrete models is presented. D2C aims to separate potentially repetitive calculations from those specific to single grid cells. The underlying idea is to extract processes that do not require information about a grid cell's neighbourhood to a reduced-size non-spatial layer, which is dynamically coupled to the original two-dimensional layer. The size of the non-spatial layer is thereby adaptive and depends on dynamic classifications according to pre-specified similarity criteria. I present how D2C can be used in a model implementation on the example of TreeMig-2L, a new, efficient version of the intermediate-complexity forest-landscape model TreeMig. To discuss the trade-off between computational expenses and accuracy, as well as the applicability of D2C, I compare different model stages of TreeMig-2L via simulations of two different application scenarios. This comparison of different model stages demonstrates that applying D2C can strongly reduce computational expenses of processes calculated on the new non-spatial layer. D2C is thus a valuable upscaling method for models and applications in which processes requiring information about the neighbourhood constitute the minor share of the overall computational expenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ongoing political debate on climate change, global mean temperature change (▵Tglob) has become the yardstick by which mitigation costs, impacts from unavoided climate change, and adaptation requirements are discussed. For a scientifically informed discourse along these lines, systematic assessments of climate change impacts as a function of ▵Tglob) are required. The current availability of climate change scenarios constrains this type of assessment to a narrow range of temperature change and/or a reduced ensemble of climate models. Here, a newly composed dataset of climate change scenarios is presented that addresses the specific requirements for global assessments of climate change impacts as a function of ▵Tglob). A pattern-scaling approach is applied to extract generalised patterns of spatially explicit change in temperature, precipitation and cloudiness from 19 Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs). The patterns are combined with scenarios of global mean temperature increase obtained from the reducedcomplexity climate model MAGICC6 to create climate scenarios covering warming levels from 1.5 to 5 degrees above pre-industrial levels around the year 2100. The patterns are shown to sufficiently maintain the original AOGCMs' climate change properties, even though they, necessarily, utilise a simplified relationships between ▵ Tglob) and changes in local climate properties. The dataset (made available online upon final publication of this paper) facilitates systematic analyses of climate change impacts as it covers a wider and finer-spaced range of climate change scenarios than the original AOGCM simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]