the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
A case for open communication of bugs in climate models, made with ICON version 2024.01
Abstract. Climate models are not just numerical representations of scientific knowledge, they are also human-written software programs. As such, they contain coding mistakes, which may look mundane, but can affect the results of interconnected and complex models in unforeseen ways. These bugs are underacknowledged in the climate science community.
We describe a sea ice bug in the coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice model ICON and its history. The bug was caused by a logical flag that was set incorrectly, such that the ocean did not experience friction from sea ice and thus the surface velocity did not slow down, especially in the presence of ocean eddies. While describing the bug and its effects, we also give an example of visual and concise bug communication. In addition, we conceptualize this bug as representing a novel species of resolution-dependent bugs. These are long-standing bugs that are discovered during the transition to high-resolution climate models due to features that are resolved at the kilometer scale. This case study serves to illustrate the value of open documentation of bugs in climate models and to encourage our community to adopt a similar approach.
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Status: open (until 23 Jan 2025)
Data sets
Data and scripts for the publication "A case for open communication of bugs in climate models" Ulrike Proske et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14220611
Model code and software
ICON release 2024.01 The ICON partnership (DWD, MPI-M, DKRZ, KIT, C2SM) https://doi.org/10.35089/WDCC/IconRelease01
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