The Internaional Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) project is an on-going effort to systemically and holisitcally compare (a.k.a., “benchmark”) Earth System Model predictions with reference data. Reference data could be site measurements, gridded satellite products, reanalysis products, or other types of observational data. The ILAMB software compares model to reference data using bias, RMSE, annual cycles, spatial distributions, and (optionally) variable-to-variable comparisons. To meaningfully interpret comparisons, users must be familiar with the methodologies we employ. So, we recommend that you first read our paper, Collier, et al. 2018, which details conmparison methodologies and provides our philosophy for how results should be used and interpreted.
- Collier, N., Hoffman, F. M., Lawrence, D. M., Keppel‐Aleks, G., Koven, C. D., Riley, W. J., Mu, M., & Randerson, J. T. (2018). The International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) System: Design, Theory, and Implementation. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10(11), 2731–2754. 10.1029/2018ms001354