November 23, 2023
The ACCESS-NRI Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team has recently released two new workflows for the Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) and the International Land Benchmarking (ILAMB) tools.
Model evaluation tools allow researchers to compare and evaluate different Earth-system models, which is essential to test their accuracy and understand how they compare against other models and with available observations.
ESMValTool and ILAMB are developed by an international community of researchers and research software engineers. ACCESS-NRI is joining those efforts and releasing configurations and workflows for those tools to be used by the ACCESS community at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). These two workflows are specifically designed to connect the ACCESS modelling outputs to the wealth of data available at NCI.
“ACCESS-NRI provide a support framework for Australian researchers to develop new diagnostics and metrics. These tools help them understand climate model outputs and answer fundamental questions around climate and its evolution”, says MED Team leader Romain Beucher.
“As Earth system models become increasingly complex, there is a growing need in the community for comprehensive and multi-faceted evaluation tools of model projections”.
ESMValTool is a community-developed diagnostic and performance metrics tool for evaluation of Earth System Models in CMIP (Climate Model Intercomparison Project). It allows for routine comparison of single or multiple models, either against predecessor versions or against observations.
ILAMB is a model-data intercomparison and integration project designed to improve the performance of land models and, in parallel, improve the design of new measurement campaigns to reduce uncertainties associated with key land surface processes.
“The ability to run ESMValTool and ILAMB locally has been on our wish list for many years. Without these types of tools, model evaluation is much more ad-hoc with research teams tending to focus on a limited set of metrics that are focussed on their own expertise or research interest. ESMValTool and ILAMB provide the opportunity for more comprehensive evaluation and comparison between models or model versions. This will be vital in our preparation of a new ACCESS configuration for contributing to CMIP7,” says Rachel Law, CSIRO
What are we releasing?
ESMValTool-workflow v1.0
ESMValTool-workflow is the ACCESS-NRI supported workflow for running the ESMValTool at NCI. The workflow includes the ESMValTool Python package and collection of recipes, diagnostics and observational datasets. It is also configured to leverage the existing CMIP data collections at NCI.
ILAMB-workflow v1.0
ILAMB-workflow is the ACCESS-NRI supported workflow for running ILAMB at NCI. It includes the ILAMB Python packages, a series of ILAMB output for ACCESS model evaluation and the ILAMB-Data collection of observational datasets. ILAMB-workflow is configured to use the existing NCI supported CMIP data collections.
Drop-in Sessions
The Model Evaluation and Diagnostics team will be running two virtual drop-in sessions in the first week of December to introduce the newly released ILAMB-workflow and ESMValTool-workflow on NCI Gadi. Keep an eye on our Upcoming events page for more details.