An Assessment of the Foundational Assumptions in High-Resolution Climate Projections: The Case of UKCP09

Frigg, Roman and Smith, Leonard A. and Stainforth, David A. (2015) An Assessment of the Foundational Assumptions in High-Resolution Climate Projections: The Case of UKCP09. [Preprint]

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Official URL: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-01...

Abstract

The United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme’s UKCP09 project makes high-resolution projections of the climate out to 2100 by post-processing the outputs of a large-scale global climate model. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the methodology used and then urge some caution. Given the acknowledged systematic, shared errors of all current climate models, treating model outputs as decision-relevant projections can be significantly misleading. In extrapolatory situations, such as projections of future climate change, there is little reason to expect that post-processing
of model outputs can correct for the consequences of such errors. This casts doubt on our ability, today, to make trustworthy, high-resolution probabilistic projections out to the end of this century.

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Item Type:

Preprint

Creators:

Creators	Email	ORCID
Frigg, Roman	r.p.frigg@lse.ac.uk
Smith, Leonard A.	lenny@maths.ox.ac.uk
Stainforth, David A.	d.a.stainforth@lse.ac.uk

Keywords:

Climate change; prediction; projection; simulation; model; probability; reliability; emulation; systematic error; decision-making; structural model error.

Subjects:

General Issues > Models and Idealization
Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
General Issues > Science and Policy

Depositing User:

Roman Frigg

Date Deposited:

12 May 2015 15:34

Last Modified:

12 May 2015 15:34

Item ID:

11462

Official URL:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-01...