LENSExample: Surface temperature sensitivity from the NCAR Climate model.

In fields: Tools for Spatial Data

Surface temperature sensitivity from the NCAR Climate model.

Description

Based on the NCAR Earth System Model (CESM). the local change in surface temperature (C) expected by a 1 degree change in the global average. This statistic is referred as the climate sensitivity and was found by OLS regression on a 30 member ensemble of climate runs.

Format

The usual image format with components x, y and z.

x Equally spaced longitude values.

y Equally spaced latitude values.

z Climate sensitivity on a 288X192 grid.

Source

The CESM Large Ensemble Project, led by Clara Deser and Jennifer Kay, is a publicly available set of climate model simulations intended for understanding variability in the Earth's climate system and climate change. See https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/community-projects/lens for background.

All simulations are performed with the nominal 1-degree latitude/longitude version of the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) with CAM5.2 as its atmospheric component. Each member is subject to the same radiative forcing scenario historical up to 2005 and RCP8.5 thereafter. Here the main component of these scenarios are the observed or projected greenhouse gas emisions leading to global warming. Each climate run begins from a slightly different initial atmospheric state, created by randomly perturbing temperatures at the level of round-off error. Even this subtle difference due to nonlinear dynamics leads to climate simulations that can be assumed to be independent realizations.

Here 30 members of the ensemble are summarized to give local sensitivity for the Northern Hemisphere summer months, June, July, and August (aka JJA). This involves an linear regression on the summer mean time series for each model grid box with the global summer average and for each ensemble member. The 30 slopes from the regressions for each grid box are averaged to get the sensitivity in this data set.

See the fields package github repository for the R script that creates this data set from the model output.

Examples

data(LENSExample)
imagePlot( LENSExample)

# Nathan Lenssen's version
 
divMap(LENSExample$x, LENSExample$y, LENSExample$z,
      worldCol="white", lwd=.5, zCap=2, wrapVal=c(-180, 180))

fields documentation built on Sept. 9, 2025, 5:39 p.m.