Quantifying Uncertainty in E3SM

  • February 2, 2019
  • Home Page Feature,Science and Technical Highlights
  • The relative contributions—importance—of 18 parameters

    The relative contributions—importance—of 18 parameters and their interactions for nine objective variables in the E3SM Atmosphere Model.

    Parametric Sensitivity and Uncertainty Quantification in the E3SM Atmosphere Model

    The study provides a unique strategy to sharpen understanding of the behavior and physics within the model’s atmospheric component.

     

    The Science

    The atmospheric component of the U.S. Department of Energy’s recently released Energy Exascale Earth System Atmosphere Model version 1 (EAMv1) includes many new features to improve modeling of water cycle processes. Nonlinear interactions among the new features create a significant challenge for understanding EAMv1’s behavior and tuning the various parameters in the physics parameterizations. Researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory led an effort to understand and quantify structural errors and identify the most influential parameters within EAMv1. Scientists quantified the simulation sensitivity to those parameters by designing and conducting short ensemble simulations, which provided an opportunity to evaluate and optimize model fidelity in a systematic and computationally efficient manner.

     

    The Impact

    Modeling water cycle processes such as clouds and precipitation is a significant challenge in Earth system modeling, but water availability and extreme storms have important implications for energy production and use. This study provides a comprehensive picture of EAMv1’s behavior and improves understanding of model sensitivity to parameters and their interactions in the model. The key findings will help guide next-generation development to reduce model uncertainty in projecting future water cycle change. The short ensemble simulation strategy also provides insights for optimizing use of DOE’s leadership computing facilities for exascale Earth system modeling.

     

    Summary

    Relative significance of each parameter for the nine object variables

    Relative significance (based on the relative contribution in percentage to the total variance) of each parameter for the nine object variables analyzed by he generalized linear model based on the perturbed parameter ensemble simulations. Larger number (warmer color) indicates higher level of significance.

    Improving a model’s predictive skill requires tuning to optimize the model representations of physical processes relative to those observed in the real world. Models are commonly tuned one parameter at a time, which can lead to improvements in one aspect at the expense of degradation in another. To address the confounding effects of process interactions, researchers identified 18 parameters that could play a significant role in the representation of cloud microphysics, turbulence, and convection in EAMv1. These processes collectively represent major uncertainty in modeling the Earth’s water cycle. The team conducted more than 6,000 five-day simulations that perturbed the parameters simultaneously using the Latin hypercube sampling method. From the perturbed parameter ensemble (PPE) simulations and the use of different skill score functions, researchers identified the most sensitive parameters, quantified how the model responded to changes of the parameters for both global mean and spatial distribution, and estimated the maximum likelihood of model parameter space for a number of important fidelity metrics. Comparison of the parametric sensitivity using simulations of two different simulation lengths suggested that PPE using short simulations had some bearing on understanding parametric sensitivity of longer simulations. Results from this analysis provided a more comprehensive picture of EAMv1’s behavior. The difficulty in reducing biases—offsets from observations—in multiple variables simultaneously highlights the need to characterize model structural uncertainty (so-called embedded errors) to inform future development efforts.

     

    Publication

    Qian Y, H Wan, B Yang, J-C Golaz, B Harrop, Z Hou, VE Larson, LR Leung, G Lin, W Lin, P-L Ma, H-Y Ma, P Rasch, B Singh, H Wang, S Xie, and K Zhang. 2018. “Parametric Sensitivity and Uncertainty Quantification in the Version 1 of E3SM Atmosphere Model Based on Short Perturbed Parameter Ensemble Simulations.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 123(23):13,046−13,073. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JD028927

     

    Also visit the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) web page for this publication.

     

    Contact:

    Ruby Leung and Yun Qian
    Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

    Funding:

    This research was supported as part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research Earth System Modeling program. B.Y. at Nanjing University was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41675101). V.L. at UWM was supported by grant DE-SC0016287 through a Climate Model Development and Validation (CMDV) project funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the DOE Office of Science. This research used high-performance computing resources from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supported by the DOE Office of Science under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, PNNL Institutional Computing, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science user facility supported under contract DEAC02-05CH11231.

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