Model Testing
Econometrics provides many useful tools for evaluating models, including climate models. I plan to do a few projects on this topic in the near future.
MODEL-DATA TREND COMPARISONS: A first foray into this topic looks at how to compare model-generated trends to observations. There have been some rather simplistic methods used before now, based on t-stats with "effective degrees of freedom" adjustments &whatnot. The following paper explains more accurate testing methods using panel regression and multivariate trend estimations that have higher power and greater robustness to complex autocorrelation patterns. The application is to the tropical troposphere, an important regions for testing models' ability to quantify the atmospheric response to greenhouse gases. A few recent studies differed on whether models significantly overstate the warming or not. We find that up to 1999 there was only weak evidence for this, but on updated data the models appear to significantly overpredict warming.
MODEL-DATA TREND COMPARISONS: A first foray into this topic looks at how to compare model-generated trends to observations. There have been some rather simplistic methods used before now, based on t-stats with "effective degrees of freedom" adjustments &whatnot. The following paper explains more accurate testing methods using panel regression and multivariate trend estimations that have higher power and greater robustness to complex autocorrelation patterns. The application is to the tropical troposphere, an important regions for testing models' ability to quantify the atmospheric response to greenhouse gases. A few recent studies differed on whether models significantly overstate the warming or not. We find that up to 1999 there was only weak evidence for this, but on updated data the models appear to significantly overpredict warming.
- ** McKitrick, Ross R., Stephen McIntyre and Chad Herman (2010) "Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Sets". Atmospheric Science Letters, DOI: 10.1002/asl.290. Data/code archive.
