What Influences the Skill of Climate Models over the Continents?

Climate modeling groups from four continents have submitted simulations as part of phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). With climate impact assessment in mind, we test the accuracy of the seasonal averages of temperature, precipitation, and mean sea level pressure, compared to two observational datasets. Nondimensional skill scores have been generated for the global land and six continental domains. For most cases the 25 models analyzed perform well, particularly the models from Europe. Overall, this CMIP5 ensemble shows improved skill over the earlier (ca. 2005) CMIP3 ensemble of 24 models. This improvement is seen for each variable and continent, and in each case it is largely consistent with the increased resolution on average of CMIP5, given the correlation between scores and grid length found across the combined ensemble. From this apparent influence on skill, the smaller average score for the 13 Earth system models in CMIP5 is consistent with their mostly lower resolution. There is some variation in the ranking of models by skill score for the global, versus continental, measures of skill, and this prompts consideration of the potential influence of a regional focus that model developers might have. While some models rank considerably better in their “home” continent than globally, most have similar ranks in the two domains. Averaging over each ensemble, the home rank is better by only one or two ranks, indicating that the location of development is only a minor influence.