Mahlstein, Irina

Research interests

Despite the fact that climate models are getting continuously better in simulating the present day mean state, their spread a century into the future has not decreased. This suggests that an accurate representation of the mean state provides little information on the ability of a model to predict the future climate. Therefore, the skill of a climate model should be defined on other quantities than observations.

In order to improve the overall results it seems natural that combining the results of all CMIP3 climate models will lead to improved climate projections. Given the differences in model performance, the problem of dependence and common bias, it seems unlikely that blindly averaging across all models with equal weight is making optimal use of the available information. Finding weights to attach to the models before averaging is one focus of my studies.

The definition of an climate change index which can be compared across regions can help to get a quick overview. We propose to construct a climate change index taking into account changes other than only the climate mean state.

Articles in Reviewed Journals

Mahlstein, I. and R. Knutti, 2010, Regional climate change patterns identified by cluster analysis, Climate Dynamics, 35, 587-600, doi: 10.1007/s00382-009-0654-0, PDF (1.5MB)
Huber, M. B., I. Mahlstein , M. Wild, J. Fasullo and R. Knutti, 2011, Constraints on climate sensitivity from radiation patterns in climate models. Journal of Climate, 24, 1034-1052, PDF(2.6MB)
Mahlstein, I., and R. Knutti, 2011. Ocean heat transport as a cause for model uncertainty in projected Arctic warming. Journal of Climate, 24, 1451-1460, PDF(2.1MB)
Schaller, N., I. Mahlstein, J. Cermak and R. Knutti, 2011. Analyzing precipitation projections: A comparison of different approaches to climate model evaluation . Accepted in JGR.

Submitted Articles

I. Mahlstein, R. Knutti, S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, 2011. Early onset of significant local warming in low latitude countries . Submitted to PNAS.

PhD Thesis

Mahlstein, I., 2010. Improving climate model projections by model evaluation and regional aggregation

Diploma Thesis

Mahlstein, I., 2006. Potential Vorticity Gradients - Climatological Properties and Forecast Verification in the ERA-40 Framework, PDF