Functionality of Ice Line Latitudinal EBM Tenacity (FILLET). Protocol Version 1.1

TL;DR

The FILLET project compares energy balance models for exoplanet climates through standardized experiments, providing community benchmarks, ensemble averages, and detailed state distinctions to improve model reliability and understanding.

Contribution

This study updates the FILLET protocol to include new experimental parameters and reporting requirements, enhancing model comparison and robustness for diverse climate states.

Findings

Established standardized protocols for EBM comparison

Provided ensemble averages and standard deviations for model outputs

Enhanced experimental design to capture diverse climate states

Abstract

The Functionality of Ice Line Latitudinal EBM Tenacity (FILLET) project is a CUISINES exoplanet model intercomparison project (exo-MIP) that compares various energy balance models (EBMs) through a series of numerical experiments. The objective is to establish rigorous protocols that enable the identification of intrinsic differences among EBMs that could lead to model-dependent results for past, current, and future EBM studies. Such efforts also provide the community with an EBM ensemble average and standard deviation, rather than a single model prediction, on benchmark cases typically used by EBM studies. These experiments include Earth-like planets at different obliquity, instellation, and carbon dioxide abundance. Here we update the v1.0 protocol (Deitrick et al., 2023) to accommodate the requirements of previously untested community models. In particular, we expand the range of carbon dioxide abundances for Experiment 4 to ensure any code will capture both snowball and ice-free end states. Additionally, participants are now required to report two ice edge latitudes per hemisphere to fully distinguish all climate states (snowball, ice caps, ice belts, and ice-free). The outputs described in FILLET protocol version 1.0 have also now been revised to include the maximum and minimum ice extent, in latitude, for each hemisphere, as well as the diffusion coefficient and outgoing longwave radiative flux.