Evaluating the accuracy of climate change pattern emulation for low warming targets

They are also small relative to the noise introduced into the estimates of the forced response by internal variability within a single model, which we can assess from either control simulations or initial condition ensembles. Challenges arise when scaling inadvertently reduces the inter-model spread or suppresses the internal variability, both important sources of uncertainty for impact assessment, or when the scenarios have very different characteristics in the composition of the forcings.

Taking advantage of an available suite of coupled model simulations under low-warming and intermediate scenarios, we evaluate the accuracy of these emulation techniques and show that they are unlikely to represent a substantial contribution to the total uncertainty.