UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Equilibrium climate sensitivity — how sensitive the Earth's climate is to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide — may be underestimated in individual climate models, according to a team of climate scientists.

"Probabilistic estimates of climate system properties often rely on the comparison of model simulation to observed temperature records and an estimate of the internal climate variability," the researchers report in Geophysical Research Letters. If the internal climate variability is wrong, then the probabilistic estimates will be wrong and climate predictions could miss the mark.

"We're looking at temperature changes in the tropics and in the temperate northern hemisphere at higher latitudes," said Chris E. Forest, professor of climate dynamics at Penn State. "We're focusing on simple single equations and using time series analysis because for this to work, we need to make thousands of runs of the models."

That requirement of thousands of model runs also requires large amounts of computing power, and Forest is an associate of the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.

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Individual climate models may not provide the complete picture