New scientific diagnostics in the ESMValTool – an overview

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) has been developed with the aim of taking model evaluation to the next level by facilitating analysis of many different ESM components, providing well-documented source code and scientific background of implemented diagnostics and metrics and allowing for traceability and reproducibility of results (provenance). This has been made possible by a lively and growing development community continuously improving the tool supported by multiple national and European projects. The latest major release (v2.0) of the ESMValTool has been officially introduced in August 2020 as a large community effort, and since then several additional smaller releases have followed.

The diagnostic part of the ESMValTool includes a large collection of standard “recipes” for reproducing peer-reviewed analyses of many variables across ESM compartments including atmosphere, ocean, and land domains, with diagnostics and performance metrics focusing on the mean-state, trends, variability and important processes, phenomena, as well as emergent constraints. While most of the diagnostics use observational data sets (in particular satellite and ground-based observations) or reanalysis products for model evaluation some are also based on model-to-model comparisons. This presentation gives an overview on the latest scientific diagnostics and metrics added during the last year including examples of applications of these diagnostics to CMIP6 model data.