Uncertainty analysis of a greenhouse effect model

There are numerous mathematical models of many environmental phenomena and new ones are continually being constructed. These models, typically depend on a large number of parameters and are often able to reproduce historical trends of the quantities they represent. However, it would also be very useful to have a methodology for assessing the reliability of the models’ forecasts in terms of how fast they propagate errors. This would allow us to compare different models and, perhaps, select the one which magnifies errors at a slow rate. In this paper we deal with a model formulated as a dynamical system but we expect that conceptually similar approaches to the uncertainty analysis may be used in other classes of models.

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