Report 47:  Determination of the Sampling Size of AGCM Ensemble Simulationstions

Wehner, Michael F.

September 1998, 24 pp. 

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Historically, the high computational expense of performing lengthy climate simulations has limited the number of realizations in ensemble calculations. In this paper, we exploit the computational advantage of a recently developed parallel atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) to determine the number of realizations required to calculate the model's statistics to a specified degree of certainty. Using standard statistical analysis techniques, this minimum ensemble size is found to be highly dependent on which output field is under examination. A strong dependence on location, season and averaging is also revealed. (pdf file)

UCRL-MI-123395