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11 - Occam’s Beard

The Emergence of Complexity

from Part II - The Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

R. Saravanan
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
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Summary

Climate is an emergent system with many interacting processes and components. Complexity is essential to accurately model the system and make quantitative predictions. But this complexity obscures the different compensating errors inherent in climate models. The Anna Karenina principle, which assumes that these compensating errors are random, is introduced. By using models with different formulations for small-scale processes to make predictions and then averaging them, we can expect to cancel out the random errors. This multimodel averaging can increase the skill of climate predictions, provided the models are sufficiently diverse. Climate models tend to borrow formulations from each other, which can lead to “herd mentality” and reduce model diversity. The need to preserve the diversity of models works against the need for replicability of results from those models. A compromise between these two conflicting goals becomes essential.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Climate Demon
Past, Present, and Future of Climate Prediction
, pp. 166 - 177
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Occam’s Beard
  • R. Saravanan, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Climate Demon
  • Online publication: 02 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039604.015
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  • Occam’s Beard
  • R. Saravanan, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Climate Demon
  • Online publication: 02 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039604.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Occam’s Beard
  • R. Saravanan, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Climate Demon
  • Online publication: 02 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039604.015
Available formats
×