Importance of Minor‐Looking Treatments in Global Climate Models

Abstract

AbstractIt is very well known that parameter tuning can have a major impact on the performance of Global Climate Models. However, parameter tuning is not the only implementation detail that can drastically affect model performance and the representation of various phenomena in models. “Minor‐looking treatments” often exert a critical control on model performance; they include lower and upper limits of physical variables, thresholds of variables that control the enabling or disabling of a specific process, whether two schemes can work together or only one scheme works exclusively, and numerical methods including the order of calling various physics schemes. The impacts of such minor‐looking treatments are sometimes comparable to or even larger than those obtained by introducing advanced parameterizations based on theory and observation. Because the importance of these treatments is often overlooked and not discussed in the literature, we comprehensively summarize examples of various minor‐looking treatments that can considerably affect model performance.