Variable-to-variable relationship plots that are part of the standard ILAMB diagnostic output. These “heat maps” show the frequency of occurrence of each pairing of surface temperature and vegetation gross primary productivity from observations (b) and the model (c) facilitating a visual assessment of how well the model replicates the observed pattern of relationships between the two quantities.
Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES)

The International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) system described by Collier et al. [2018]  is a valuable and versatile set of software tools for the land surface modeling community to validate and improve their models. It is a next generation approach to community model verification and comparison, moving beyond the capabilities of the world’s first model inter-comparison project developed in the early 1990s, the Project for Intercomparison of Land Surface Parameterization Schemes (PILPS).

The ILAMB software package is open source, Python-based, community driven, extensible, and customizable. Given the growing recognition of the importance of the land surface in weather and climate prediction, its role in extreme events like droughts and heat-waves, and its growing importance as a source of feedbacks in a changing climate, ILAMB is becoming an invaluable tool for improving models of the terrestrial component of the Earth System.

Citation: Collier, N., Hoffman, F. M., Lawrence, D. M., Keppel‐Aleks, G., Koven, C. D., Riley, W. J., et al. [2018]. The International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) system: Design, theory, and implementation. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001354

—Paul A. Dirmeyer, Editor, JAMES

Text © 2018. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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