Emulators

Climate Change 2021 – The Physical Science Basis, Annex VII: Glossary, written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, defines emulation as: ‘Reproducing the behaviour of complex, process-based models (namely, Earth system models, ESMs) via simpler approaches, using either emulators or simple climate models (SCMs). The computational efficiency of emulating approaches opens new analytical possibilities given that ESMs take a lot of computational resources for each simulation.

It suggest that emulators as: ‘A broad class of heavily parametrized models (‘simple climate models’), statistical methods like neural networks, genetic algorithms or other artificial intelligence approaches designed to reproduce the responses of more complex, process-based Earth system models (ESMs). The main application of emulators is to extrapolate insights from ESMs and observational constraints to a larger set of emission scenarios. See also Emulation and Simple climate model (SCM).’

And the energy balance model (EBM) is: ‘An energy balance model is a simplified climate model that is typically used as an emulator of climate to analyse the energy budget of the Earth to compute changes in the climate. In its simplest form, there is no explicit spatial dimension, and the model then provides an estimate of the changes in globally averaged temperature computed from the changes in radiation. This zero-dimensional energy balance model can be extended to a one-dimensional or two-dimensional model if changes to the energy budget with respect to latitude, or both latitude and longitude, are explicitly considered.’

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