A mathematical approach to understanding emergent constraints

Abstract

One of the approaches to constrain uncertainty in climate models is the identification of emergent constraints. These are physically explainable empirical relationships between a particular simulated characteristic of the current climate and future climate change from an ensemble of climate models, which can be exploited using current observations. In this paper, we develop a theory to understand the appearance of such emergent constraints. Based on this theory, we also propose a classification for emergent constraints, and applications are shown for several idealized climate models. .