Model benchmarking and monitoring with ESMValTool

Abstract

Earth system models are important tools to improve our understanding of current climate and to project climate change. Particularly during the model development phase, it is important to continuously monitor how well the historical climate is reproduced and to systematically analyze, evaluate, understand, and document possible shortcomings. Here, new features of the software package ESMValTool (Earth System Model Evaluation Tool) are presented that allow for comparing and visualizing a model's performance in reproducing observations within the context of other climate models in an easy and user-friendly way. The aim is to help model developers to assess and monitor their simulations more efficiently.