Climate model intercomparisons and MIPs
If you know that future projections about climate change are based on climate modelling, the next obvious question to ask is 一 which climate model(s) are we talking about and trusting to portend our future? The answer lies in CMIP 一 or the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 一 but before I introduce you to a lot of MIP-like acronyms, some background would be good. Back in 1992, Lawrence Gates wrote about the AMIP 一 or the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project. This wasn't a particularly new thing for meteorology, but it was the first of its kind in the field of climatology. Why? Weather and climate models are essentially huge sets of code that take in some input, make a very large number of calculations, and return physically meaningful numbers for things like temperature, precipitation etc. Modelling is an expensive undertaking 一 both in terms of resources and skills. However, short-term weather forecasts tend to take fewer computational resources than long-term cl