Basic example

FaIR v2.1 is object-oriented and designed to be more flexible than its predecessors. This does mean that setting up a problem is different to before - gone are the days of 60 keyword arguments to fair_scm and we now use classes and functions with fewer arguments that in the long run should be easier to use. Of course, there is a learning curve, and will take some getting used to. This tutorial aims to walk through a simple problem using FaIR 2.1.

The structure of FaIR 2.1 centres around the FAIR class, which contains all information about the scenario(s), the forcer(s) we want to investigate, and any configurations specific to each species and the response of the climate.

A run is initialised as follows:

f = FAIR()

To this we need to add some information about the time horizon of our model, forcers we want to run with, their configuration (and the configuration of the climate), and optionally some model control options:

f.define_time(2000, 2050, 1)
f.define_scenarios(['abrupt', 'ramp'])
f.define_configs(['high', 'central', 'low'])
f.define_species(species, properties)
f.ghg_method='Myhre1998'

We generate some variables: emissions, concentrations, forcing, temperature etc.:

f.allocate()

which creates xarray DataArrays that we can fill in:

fill(f.emissions, 40, scenario='abrupt', specie='CO2 FFI')
...

Finally, the model is run with

f.run()

Results are stored within the FAIR instance as xarray DataArrays or Dataset, and can be obtained such as

print(fair.temperature)

Multiple scenarios and configs can be supplied in a FAIR instance, and due to internal parallelisation is the fastest way to run the model (100 ensemble members per second for 1750-2100 on my Mac for an emissions driven run). The total number of scenarios that will be run is the product of scenarios and configs. For example we might want to run three emissions scenarios – let’s say SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0 – using climate calibrations (configs) from the UKESM, GFDL, MIROC and NorESM climate models. This would give us a total of 12 ensemble members in total which are run in parallel.