1.5 Examples of Progress in Modelling the Climate

1.5.1 Model Evolution and Model Hierarchies

Climate scenarios rely upon the use of numerical models. The continuous evolution of these models over recent decades has been enabled by a considerable increase in computational capacity, with supercomputer speeds increasing by roughly a factor of a million in the three decades from the 1970s to the present. This computational progress has permitted a corresponding increase in model complexity (by including more and more components and processes, as depicted in Figure 1.2), in the length of the simulations, and in spatial resolution, as shown in Figure 1.4. The models used to evaluate future climate changes have therefore evolved over time. Most of the pioneering work on CO₂-induced climate change was based on atmospheric general circulation models coupled to simple ‘slab’ ocean models (i.e., models omitting ocean dynamics), from the early work of Manabe and Wetherald (1975) to the review of Schlesinger and Mitchell (1987). At the same time the physical content of the models has become more comprehensive (see in Section 1.5.2 the example of clouds). Similarly, most of the results presented in the FAR were from atmospheric models, rather than from models of the coupled climate system, and were used to analyse changes in the equilibrium climate resulting from a doubling of the atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Current climate projections can investigate time-dependent scenarios of climate evolution and can make use of much more complex coupled ocean-atmosphere models, sometimes even including interactive chemical or biochemical components.

Figure 1.4. Geographic resolution characteristic of the generations of climate models used in the IPCC Assessment Reports: FAR (IPCC, 1990), SAR (IPCC, 1996), TAR (IPCC, 2001a), and AR4 (2007). The figures above show how successive generations of these global models increasingly resolved northern Europe. These illustrations are representative of the most detailed horizontal resolution used for short-term climate simulations. The century-long simulations cited in IPCC Assessment Reports after the FAR were typically run with the previous generation’s resolution. Vertical resolution in both atmosphere and ocean models is not shown, but it has increased comparably with the horizontal resolution, beginning typically with a single-layer slab ocean and ten atmospheric layers in the FAR and progressing to about thirty levels in both atmosphere and ocean.

A parallel evolution toward increased complexity and resolution has occurred in the domain of numerical weather prediction, and has resulted in a large and verifiable improvement in operational weather forecast quality. This example alone shows that present models are more realistic than were those of a decade ago. There is also, however, a continuing awareness that models do not provide a perfect simulation of reality, because resolving all important spatial or time scales remains far beyond current capabilities, and also because the behaviour of such a complex nonlinear system may in general be chaotic.

It has been known since the work of Lorenz (1963) that even simple models may display intricate behaviour because of their nonlinearities. The inherent nonlinear behaviour of the climate system appears in climate simulations at all time scales (Ghil, 1989). In fact, the study of nonlinear dynamical systems has become important for a wide range of scientific disciplines, and the corresponding mathematical developments are essential to interdisciplinary studies. Simple models of ocean-atmosphere interactions, climate-biosphere interactions or climate-economy interactions may exhibit a similar behaviour, characterised by partial unpredictability, bifurcations and transition to chaos.

In addition, many of the key processes that control climate sensitivity or abrupt climate changes (e.g., clouds, vegetation, oceanic convection) depend on very small spatial scales. They cannot be represented in full detail in the context of global models, and scientific understanding of them is still notably incomplete. Consequently, there is a continuing need to assist in the use and interpretation of complex models through models that are either conceptually simpler, or limited to a number of processes or to a specific region, therefore enabling a deeper understanding of the processes at work or a more relevant comparison with observations. With the development of computer capacities, simpler models have not disappeared; on the contrary, a stronger emphasis has been given to the concept of a ‘hierarchy of models’ as the only way to provide a linkage between theoretical understanding and the complexity of realistic models (Held, 2005).

The list of these ‘simpler’ models is very long. Simplicity may lie in the reduced number of equations (e.g., a single equation for the global surface temperature); in the reduced dimensionality of the problem (one-dimension vertical, one-dimension latitudinal, two-dimension); or in the restriction to a few processes (e.g., a mid-latitude quasi-geostrophic atmosphere with or without the inclusion of moist processes). The notion of model hierarchy is also linked to the idea of scale: global circulation models are complemented by regional models that exhibit a higher resolution over a given area, or process oriented models, such as cloud resolving models or large eddy simulations. Earth Models of Intermediate Complexity are used to investigate long time scales, such as those corresponding to glacial to interglacial oscillations (Berger et al., 1998). This distinction between models according to scale is evolving quickly, driven by the increase in computer capacities. For example, global models explicitly resolving the dynamics of convective clouds may soon become computationally feasible.

Many important scientific debates in recent years have had their origin in the use of conceptually simple models. The study of idealised atmospheric representations of the tropical climate, for example by Pierrehumbert (1995) who introduced a separate representation of the areas with ascending and subsiding circulation in the tropics, has significantly improved the understanding of the feedbacks that control climate. Simple linearized models of the atmospheric circulation have been used to investigate potential new feedback effects. Ocean box models have played an important role in improving the understanding of the possible slowing down of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (Birchfield et al., 1990), as emphasized in the TAR. Simple models have also played a central role in the interpretation of IPCC scenarios: the investigation of climate scenarios presented in the SAR or the TAR has been extended to larger ensembles of cases using idealised models.