Friday, October 29, 2010

A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data

A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data - Hydrological Sciences Journal

Before we spend trillions of dollars cutting carbon dioxide emissions based on the output from computer models, how about if we get a computer model whose output correlates reasonably well with observations?

Abstract

We compare the output of various climate models to temperature and precipitation observations at 55 points around the globe. We also spatially aggregate model output and observations over the contiguous USA using data from 70 stations, and we perform comparison at several temporal scales, including a climatic (30-year) scale. Besides confirming the findings of a previous assessment study that model projections at point scale are poor, results show that the spatially integrated projections are also poor.

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