A Statistical Investigation of the CESM Ensemble Consistency Testing Framework

The CESM Ensemble Consistency Test (CESM-ECT) was developed as a flexible but objective method for checking the statistical consistency between an accepted ensemble of climate simulations and a new simulation created with updated code or within a new computational infrastructure.

CESM-ECT utilizes a testing framework based on the popular technique of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to determine whether a set of new simulations is statistically distinguishable from the established ensemble of climate simulations. One shortcoming of PCA is that accurate estimation requires the computational expense of a large ensemble. In this work we begin with an exploratory analysis of the CESM climate simulation data as well as an overview of PCA.