State of the art diagnostics

AQUA provides a collection of built-in diagnostics to analyze climate model outputs. The family of diagnostics named state-of-the-art lists diagnostics which can be used for the simulation monitoring and make use of low resolution data as input (1 degree in both latitude and longitude and monthly frequency). Most of these diagnostics can be compared with observations to produce metrics of evaluation and aim at providing an assessment of the model against observational datasets and, in some selected occasions, pre-existing climate simulations.

List of diagnostics

This list includes such diagnostics whose goal is to monitor and diagnose possible model drifts, imbalances and biases.

Currently implemented diagnostics are:

• Global Biases Diagnostic
• ECmean4 Performance Metrics
• Timeseries
• Ocean3D
• Radiation Budget Diagnostic
• Sea ice extent
• Teleconnections

Running the monitoring diagnostics

Each state-of-the-art diagnostic is implemented as a Python class and can be run independently. All the diagnostic have a command line interface that can be used to run them. A YAML configuration file is provided to set the options for the diagnostics.

Together with the individual diagnostics command line interfaces, AQUA provides a python script to run all the diagnostics in a single command, with a shared Dask cluster, shared output directory and with parallelization. The tool is called aqua-analysis.py and all the details can be found in AQUA analysis wrapper.

Warning

The analysis has to be performed preferrably on LRA data, meaning that data should be aggregated to a resolution of 1 degree in both latitude and longitude and to a monthly frequency.

Minimum Data Requirements

In order to obtain meaningful results, the diagnostics require a minimum amount of data. Here you can find the minimum requirements for each diagnostic.

Diagnostic	Minimum Data Required
Global Biases	1 year of data
ecmean	1 year of data
Timeseries	2 months of data
Seasonal cycles	1 year of data
Ocean3d	1 year of data, 2 months for the timeseries
Radiation	1 year of data
Seaice	1 year of data
Teleconnections	2 years of data

Note

Some diagnostics will technically run with less data, but the results may not be meaningful. Some other will raise errors in the log files if the data is not enough.