Detecting changes in large-scale metrics of climate in short integrations of a global storm-resolving model of the atmosphere

Abstract Recent advances have allowed for integration of global storm resolving models (GSRMs) to a timescale of several years. These short simulations are sufficient for studying aggregated statistics of short-timescale and small spatial-scale phenomena; however, it is questionable what we can learn from these integrations about the large-scale climate response to perturbations. To address this question, we use the response of X-SHiELD (a GSRM) to uniform sea surface temperature warming and CO 2 increase in two-year integrations and compare it to similar CMIP experiments. Specifically, we assess the statistical meaning of having two years in one model outside the spread of another model or model ensemble. This is of particular interest because X-SHiELD shows a distinct response of the global-mean precipitation to uniform warming and the northern hemisphere jet shift response to isolated CO 2 increase. To estimate the probability of X-SHiELD’s and the CMIP models having different means, we take the approach of Bayesian inference. We derive a posterior distribution for the differences in the mean between X-SHiELD and the CMIP models taking into account the X-SHiELD values for the global-mean precipitation response to uniform warming and the response of the norther hemisphere jet latitude to isolated CO 2 increase. We find that the most probable value for the difference between X-SHiELD and the CMIP mean is larger than one standard deviation, representing both internal variability and inter-model spread of the CMIP models. We also find that there is an important base-state dependence for some large-scale metrics that, when taken into account, can qualitatively change the interpretation of the results. We note that a year-to-year comparison is meaningful due to the use of prescribed sea-surface-temperature simulations.