Supermodels: Interactive Ensembles of Imperfect Models

At a dozen or so institutes around the world, comprehensive climate models are being developed and improved. Each model provides reasonable simulations of the observed climate, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In the current multi-model ensemble approach model simulations are performed independently and their results are combined a posteriori. Recently, it has been proposed to couple models interactively during simulation and run this as one supermodel. Here we review the supermodel approach in the context of small and medium sized dynamical systems, and discuss the possible merits of the approach.