NAMAP communique II: 29 March 2002

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to initiate some communication among the NAMAP participants.

First, thanks again for participating. I'm sending this out to the following NAMAPers, who have either registered on the JOSS web page or have expressed at least preliminary interest in participating:

There may be additions to this list -- and if any of you know of others who plan to carry out NAMAP runs please let me know. As the 1990 simulations proceed I want to lay out a more detailed strategy for archiving and model validation. Your suggestions and comments would be valued.

1) Note that I refer to "NAMAP" above. At the VAMOS panel meeting earlier this month we decided that "model assessment" is a more accurate and informative description of what we are doing than "model intercomparison". Hence we have switched the "I" in NAMIP to an "A".

2) I've rather arbitrarily denoted this message "communique II". I'm retroactively counting the message I sent on 19 March as communique I (and I will start archiving these messages on the NAME web page at JOSS). In my 19 March message I outlined a basic strategy for a compressed data archive format and I'd like to reiterate it here.

We are asking that model output be condensed into 2-dimension maps of monthly mean scalar fields, averaged for particular times of day at the surface or on pressure levels (e.g. 850 mb temperature at 0000Z for June 1990). These maps can be concatenated to form larger files (e.g. a sequence of June monthly mean 850 mb temperature maps for successive hours). A quick, rough estimate of data storage needed for the requested fields (obviously resolution- dependent) runs to a few hundred Mb for each simulated month even without compression.
We are planning to store these fields at JOSS and I'll be in touch with the NAME project office for details on NAMAP output archives.

3) I'm assuming that each of you will probably store more complete model output volumes yourselves for your own analyses. Although the data archive strategy outlined in (2) will preserve the basic time- averaged fields that we need to make the essential model assessments for NAMAP, it does not preserve any day-to-day time sequence information. To the extent that we wish to compare and present time series (say, daily precip time series for some particular location) we'll depend on each modeler to extract those individually as best you can.

4) With help promised from Art Douglas, I will start putting together 1990 validation data. I anticipate putting such data out on the JOSS site as well.

5) I am assuming that we'll shoot for a presentation at the October Climate Diagnostics & Prediction Workshop with all NAMAP participants as co-authors. There's still plenty of time to think about this.

What am I forgetting? And how are the runs going?

Best regards,

Dave Gutzler

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