Diagnostic tool

The Chemistry-Climate Model Validation Diagnostic (CCMVal-Diag) tool is a flexible and extensible open source package that facilitates the complex evaluation of global models. Models can be compared to other models, ensemble members (simulations with the same model), and/or many types of observations.

Acknowledgements: The development of the CCMVal diagnostic tool was supported by the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling and Analysis Program (ACMAP) grant NNX08AK54G and by the InfraStructure for the European Network for Earth System Modeling (IS-ENES) project (WP9/JRA3) which is funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. Support has also been provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR, USA), the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR, Germany), the University of Toronto (Canada) and the National Institute forWater and Atmosphere (NIWA, New Zealand). NCAR is supported by the United States National Science Foundation.

The existing CCMVal-Diag tool forms the basis of the evaluation tool to be used in CCMI. The CCMVal-Diag tool is currently being further extended into an Earth System Model Evaluation tool (ESMVal-Tool) within the FP7 Project EMBRACE and other projects, and, compared to the CCMVal-Diag tool, already includes many additional climate diagnostics and several technical improvements. The ESMValTool is a flexible and extensible open source package that facilitates the complex evaluation of global models. It is currently based on Python and the NCAR Command Language (NCL), but other open source libraries (e.g., R, CDAT, Fortran) can be called as well. The tool can be used to evaluate single models (or different versions of a model), as well as multiple models from CCMI, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), and other Model Intercomparison Projects that use CMOR-formatted output. The tool is built in such a way that the code allows for further extensions to be made by different users for different applications and types of ESMs. Several institutions have already joined the development of the ESMValTool as part of various projects in a version-controlled repository that is hosted at the German Aerospace Center using Subversion. Subversion is a free and open source version control system, which manages files and directories, and the changes made to them. The CCMI community is encouraged to help developing this evaluation tool by either joining the core development team or by contributing routines. In particular, it is hoped that those people who volunteered to lead a CCMI multi-model analysis will contribute their codes to the tool to allow for future efforts to repeat these analyses, allowing further model evaluation and benchmarking. Please contact Veronika Eyring for more information.