Process Oriented Diagnostics for High Frequency Impact Events: Bringing the Weather Scale to Climate

Abstract:

Climate model diagnostics have traditionally focused on long time scale behavior, either means or variability, from months to decades. But important climate impacts and processes occur on much shorter timescales. Here we present a series of diagnostics for important climate metrics, focusing on wave and precipitation processes, from daily to weekly scales. These processes are important for understanding climate impacts such as extreme precipitation or floods, and also the absence of precipitation for heat waves and droughts. We show how these diagnostics can be used to evaluate and improve climate models using a variety of scales and make models more fit for purpose, and constrain their impacts for societal applications.