Abstract
Climate change, induced by human greenhouse gas emission, has already influenced the environment and society. To quantify the impact of human activity on climate change, scientists have developed numerical climate models to simulate the evolution of the climate system, which often contains many parameters. The choice of parameters is of great importance to the reliability of the simulation. Therefore, parameter sensitivity analysis is needed to optimize the parameters for the model so that the physical process of nature can be reasonably simulated. In this study, we analyzed the parameter sensitivity of a simple carbon-cycle energy balance climate model, called the Minimum Complexity Earth Simulator (MiCES), in different periods using a multi-parameter sensitivity analysis method and output measurement method. The results show that the seven parameters related to heat and carbon transferred are most sensitive among all 37 parameters. Then uncertainties of the above key parameters are further analyzed by changing the input emission and temperature, providing reference bounds of parameters with 95% confidence intervals. Furthermore, we found that ocean heat capacity will be more sensitive if the simulation time becomes longer, indicating that ocean influence on climate is stronger in the future.
Highlights
Human activity, especially the emission of greenhouse gases, has caused an increase in radiative forcing of solar onto the earth system [1,2,3]
Climate models have been through rapid improvement, some of which have been extended into Earth System models by including the representation of biogeochemical cycles important to climate change
The sensitivity of the parameters of the Minimum Complexity Earth Simulator (MiCES) model at different time periods is tested by the multi-parameter sensitivity method and the output change measurement method, and the sensitive parameters, as well as the parameters with large variation of sensitivity at different time periods, are discussed
Summary
Especially the emission of greenhouse gases (including CO2 , CH4 , N2 O, etc.), has caused an increase in radiative forcing of solar onto the earth system [1,2,3]. The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady at 0.07–0.08 ◦ C/decade since 1910 [4]. Climate models are indispensable tools to analyze the temperature increase caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Climate models have been through rapid improvement, some of which have been extended into Earth System models by including the representation of biogeochemical cycles important to climate change. Climate models can be divided into the Atmospheric ocean coupling model, Earth system model, and so on.
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