Report 47: Determination of the Sampling Size of
AGCM Ensemble Simulationstions
Wehner, Michael F.
September 1998, 24 pp.
Historically, the high computational expense of performing lengthy
climate simulations has limited the number of realizations in ensemble
calculations. In this paper, we exploit the computational advantage of
a recently developed parallel atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM)
to determine the number of realizations required to calculate the model's
statistics to a specified degree of certainty. Using standard statistical
analysis techniques, this minimum ensemble size is found to be highly dependent
on which output field is under examination. A strong dependence on location,
season and averaging is also revealed. (pdf file)
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