Articles | Volume 17, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-235-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-235-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
05 Mar 2026
Research article |
| 05 Mar 2026
| 05 Mar 2026
An EOF-Based Emulator of Means and Covariances of Monthly Climate Fields
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
now at: New York University, New York, NY, USA
Andre N. Souza
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Glenn R. Flierl
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Raffaele Ferrari
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Related authors
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Christopher B. Womack, Glenn Flierl, Shahine Bouabid, Andre N. Souza, Paolo Giani, Sebastian D. Eastham, and Noelle E. Selin
Earth Syst. Dynam., 17, 107–139, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-107-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-107-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
Climate emulators allow for rapid projections without the computational costs associated with full-scale climate models. Here, we outline a framework to compare a variety of emulation techniques both theoretically and practically through a series of stress tests that expose common sources of emulator error. Our results help clarify which emulators are best suited for different tasks and show how future climate scenarios can be used to support emulator design.
Mara Freilich, Alexandre Mignot, Glenn Flierl, and Raffaele Ferrari
Biogeosciences, 18, 5595–5607, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-5595-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-5595-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
Observations reveal that in some regions phytoplankton biomass increases during the wintertime when growth conditions are sub-optimal, which has been attributed to a release from grazing during mixed layer deepening. Measurements of grazer populations to support this theory are lacking. We demonstrate that a release from grazing when the winter mixed layer is deepening holds only for certain grazing models, extending the use of phytoplankton observations to make inferences about grazer dynamics.
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Short summary
Climate models serve as good guesses of how humans affect the climate, but they cannot explore all possible future scenarios of interest. We develop a method that can serve as a fast and cheap stand-in to evaluate likely changes in variables like surface temperature and relative humidity at a regional scale in arbitrary future climates. Crucially, our method captures relationships between different geographic areas and predicts both average values and likely ranges using a unified framework.
Climate models serve as good guesses of how humans affect the climate, but they cannot explore...
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