Introduction

About

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a community-development that aims at improving diagnosing and understanding of the causes and effects of model biases and inter-model spread. The ESMValTool is open to both users and developers encouraging open exchange of diagnostic source code and evaluation results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) ensemble. This will facilitate and improve ESM evaluation beyond the state-of-the-art and aims at supporting the activities within CMIP and at individual modelling centers. We envisage running the ESMValTool routinely on the CMIP model output utilizing observations available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) in standard formats (obs4MIPs) or made available at ESGF nodes.

The goal is to develop a benchmarking and evaluation tool that produces well-established analyses as soon as model output from CMIP simulations becomes available, e.g., at one of the central repositories of the ESGF. This is realized through standard recipes that reproduce a certain set of diagnostics and performance metrics that have demonstrated its importance in benchmarking Earth System Models (ESMs) in a paper or assessment report, such as Chapter 9 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (Flato et al., 2013). The expectation is that in this way a routine and systematic evaluation of model results can be made more efficient, thereby enabling scientists to focus on developing more innovative methods of analysis rather than constantly having to “reinvent the wheel”.

In parallel to standardization of model output, the ESGF also hosts observations for Model Intercomparison Projects (obs4MIPs) and reanalyses data (ana4MIPs). obs4MIPs provides open access data sets of satellite data that are comparable in terms of variables, temporal and spatial frequency, and periods to CMIP model output (Taylor et al., 2012). The ESMValTool utilizes these observations and reanalyses from ana4MIPs plus additionally available observations in order to evaluate the models performance. In many diagnostics and metrics, more than one observational data set or meteorological reanalysis is used to assess uncertainties in observations.

The main idea of the ESMValTool is to provide a broad suite of diagnostics which can be performed easily when new model simulations are run. The suite of diagnostics needs to be broad enough to reflect the diversity and complexity of Earth System Models, but must also be robust enough to be run routinely or semi-operationally. In order the address these challenging objectives the ESMValTool is conceived as a framework which allows community contributions to be bound into a coherent framework.

Contact

See www.esmvaltool.org for general contact information.

User mailing list

Subscribe to the ESMValTool announcements mailing list esmvaltool@listserv.dfn.de to stay up to date about new releases, monthly online meetings, upcoming workshops, and trainings.

To subscribe, send an email to sympa@listserv.dfn.de with the following subject line:

  • subscribe esmvaltool

or

  • subscribe esmvaltool YOUR_FIRSTNAME YOUR_LASTNAME

The mailing list also has a public archive online.

Discussions page

The ESMValTool Discussions page is open for all general and technical questions on the ESMValTool: installation, application, development, or any other question or comment you may have.

Monthly meetings

We have monthly online meetings using zoom, anyone with an interest in the ESMValTool is welcome to join these meetings to connect with the community. These meetings are always announced in an issue on the ESMValTool repository and on the mailing-list.

Core development team

  • Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Germany (Co-PI)

    • ESMValTool Core Co-PI and Developer: contact for requests to use the ESMValTool and for collaboration with the development team, access to the PRIVATE GitHub repository.

  • Met Office, United Kingdom (Co-PI)

  • Alfred Wegener institute (AWI) Bremerhaven, Germany

  • Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain

  • Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC), The Netherlands

  • Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany

  • Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), United Kingdom

  • Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Sweden

  • University of Bremen, Germany

  • University of Reading, United Kingdom

Recipes and diagnostics

Contacts for specific diagnostic sets are the respective authors, as listed in the corresponding recipe and diagnostic documentation and in the source code.

License

The ESMValTool is released under the Apache License, version 2.0. Citation of the ESMValTool paper (“Software Documentation Paper”) is kindly requested upon use, alongside with the software DOI for ESMValTool (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3401363) and ESMValCore (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3387139) and version number:

  • Righi, M., Andela, B., Eyring, V., Lauer, A., Predoi, V., Schlund, M., Vegas-Regidor, J., Bock, L., Brötz, B., de Mora, L., Diblen, F., Dreyer, L., Drost, N., Earnshaw, P., Hassler, B., Koldunov, N., Little, B., Loosveldt Tomas, S., and Zimmermann, K.: Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) v2.0 – technical overview, Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 1179–1199, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-1179-2020, 2020.

Besides the above citation, users are kindly asked to register any journal articles (or other scientific documents) that use the software at the ESMValTool webpage (http://www.esmvaltool.org/). Citing the Software Documentation Paper and registering your paper(s) will serve to document the scientific impact of the Software, which is of vital importance for securing future funding. You should consider this an obligation if you have taken advantage of the ESMValTool, which represents the end product of considerable effort by the development team.

What ESMValTool can do for you

The ESMValTool applies a great variety of standard diagnostics and metrics, and produces a collection of netCDF and graphical files (plots). Thus, the tool needs a certain amount of input from the user so that it can:

  • establish the correct input and output parameters and the structured workflow;

  • acquire the correct data;

  • execute the workflow; and

  • output the desired collective data and media.

To facilitate these four steps, the user has control over the tool via two main input files: the user configuration file and the recipe. The configuration file sets user and site-specific parameters (like input and output paths, desired output graphical formats, logging level, etc.), whereas the recipe file sets data, preprocessing and diagnostic-specific parameters (data parameters grouped in the datasets sections, preprocessing steps for various preprocessors sections, variables’ parameters and diagnostic-specific instructions grouped in the diagnostics sections). The configuration file may be used for a very large number of runs with very minimal changes since most of the parameters it sets are recyclable; the recipe file can be used for a large number of applications, since it may include as many datasets, preprocessors and diagnostics sections as the user deems useful.

Once the user configuration files and the recipe are at hand, the user can start the tool. A schematic overview of the ESMValTool workflow is depited in the figure below.

Schematic of the system architecture.

Fig. 1 Schematic of the system architecture.

For a generalized run scenario, the tool will perform the following ordered procedures.

Data finding

  • read the data requirements from the datasets section of the recipe and assemble the data request to locate the data;

  • find the data using the specified root paths and DRS types in the configuration file (note the flexibility allowed by the data finder);

Data selection

  • data selection is performed using the parameters specified in the datasets section (including e.g. type of experiment, type of ensemble, time boundaries etc); data will be retrieved and selected for each variable that is specified in the diagnostics section of the recipe;

Data fixing

Variable derivation

  • variable derivation (in the case of non CMOR-standard variables, most likely associated with observational datasets) is performed automatically before running the preprocessor;

  • if the variable definitions are already in the database then the user will just have to specify the variableto be derived in the diagnostics section (as any other standard variable, just setting derive: true).

Run the preprocessor

  • if any preprocessor section is specified in the recipe file, then data will be loaded in memory as iris cubes and passed through the preprocessing steps required by the user and specified in the preprocessor section, using the specific preprocessing step parameters provided by the user as keys (for the parameter name) and values (for the parameter value); the preprocessing order is very imprtant since a number of steps depend on prior execution of other steps (e.g. multimodel statistics can not be computed unless all models are on a common grid, hence a prior regridding on a common grid is necessary); the preprocessor steps order can be set by the user as custom or the default order can be used;

  • once preprocessing has finished, the tool writes the data output to disk as netCDF files so that the diagnostics can pick it up and use it; the user will also be provided with a metadata file containing a summary of the preprocessing and pointers to its output. Note that writing data to disk between the preprocessing and the diagnostic phase is required to ensure multi-language support for the latter.

Run the diagnostics

  • the last and most important phase can now be run: using output files from the preprocessor, the diagnostic scripts are executed using the provided diagnostics parameters.