EGU2020-315
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-315
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The Sailor-diagram. An extension of the Taylor diagram to two-dimensional variables for verification of model data.

Jon Saenz1,2, Sheila Carreno-Madinabeitia3, Ganix Esnaola2,4, Santos J. González-Rojí5,6, Gabriel Ibarra-Berastegi2,7, and Alain Ulazia8
Jon Saenz et al.
  • 1University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Facultad de Ciencia y Tecnología, Física Aplicada II, Leioa, Spain (jon.saenz@ehu.es)
  • 2Joint Research Unit BEGIK, Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO)-Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal HerrikoUnibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), Plentziako Itsas Estazioa, Areatza Pasealekua, 48620- Plentzia, Spain
  • 3TECNALIA, Parque Tecnológico de Álava, Albert Einstein 28, 01510 Vitoria Gasteiz, Spain
  • 4Nuclear Engineering and Fluid Mechanics Dept., Gipuzkoako Ingeniaritza Eskola, Europa Plaza 1, 20018-Donostia, Spain
  • 5Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, 3010 Bern, Switzerland
  • 6Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, 3010 Bern, Switzerland
  • 7Nuclear Engineering and Fluid Mechanics Dept., Escuela de Ingeniería de Bilbao, Plaza Ingeniero Torres Quevedo 1, 48013-Bilbao, Spain
  • 8Nuclear Engineering and Fluid Mechanics Dept., Gipuzkoako Ingeniaritza Eskola, Otaola etorbidea 29, 20600-Eibar, Spain

A new diagram is proposed for the verification of vector quantities generated by individual or multiple models against a set of observations. It has been designed with the idea of extending the Taylor diagram to two-dimensional vector such as currents, wind velocity, or horizontal fluxes of water vapour, salinity, energy and other geophysical variables. The diagram is based on a principal component analysis of the two-dimensional structure of the mean squared error matrix between model and observations. This matrix is separated in two parts corresponding to the bias and the relative rotation of the empirical orthogonal functions of the data. We test the performance of this new diagram identifying the differences amongst a reference dataset and different model outputs using examples wind velocities, current, vertically integrated moisture transport and wave energy flux time series. An alternative setup is also proposed with an application to the time-averaged spatial field of surface wind velocity in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres according to different reanalyses and realizations of an ensemble of CMIP5 models. The examples of the use of the Sailor diagram show that it is a tool which helps identifying errors due to the bias or the orientation of the simulated vector time series or fields. An implementation of the algorithm in form of an R package (sailoR) is already publicly available from the CRAN repository, and besides the ability to plot the individual components of the error matrix, functions in the package also allow to easily retrieve the individual components of the mean squared error.

How to cite: Saenz, J., Carreno-Madinabeitia, S., Esnaola, G., González-Rojí, S. J., Ibarra-Berastegi, G., and Ulazia, A.: The Sailor-diagram. An extension of the Taylor diagram to two-dimensional variables for verification of model data., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-315, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-315, 2019

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