Climate Change Modelling at Reduced Float Precision with Stochastic Rounding

Abstract

Reduced precision floating point arithmetic is now routinely deployed in numerical weather forecasting over short timescales. However the applicability of these reduced precision techniques to longer timescale climate simulations - especially those which seek to describe a dynamical, changing climate - remains unclear. We investigate this question by deploying a global atmospheric, coarse resolution model known as SPEEDY to simulate a changing climate system subject to increased $\text{CO}_2$ concentrations, over a 100 year timescale. Whilst double precision is typically the operational standard for climate modelling, we find that reduced precision solutions (Float32, Float16) are sufficiently accurate. Rounding the finite precision floats stochastically, rather than using the more common ``round-to-nearest" technique, notably improves the performance of the reduced precision solutions. Over 100 years the mean bias error (MBE) in the global mean surface temperature (precipitation) relative to the double precision solution is $+2 \times 10^{-4}$K ($-8 \times 10^{-5}$ mm/6hr) at single precision and $-3.5\times 10^{-2}$ K($-1 \times 10^{-2}$ mm/6hr) at half precision, whilst the inclusion of stochastic rounding reduced the half precision error to +1.8 $\times 10^{-2}$ K ($-8 \times10^{-4}$ mm/6hr). By examining the resultant climatic distributions that arise after 100 years, the difference in the expected value of the global surface temperature, relative to the double precision solution is $\leq 5 \times 10^{-3}$ K and for precipitation $8 \times 10^{-4}$ mm/6h when numerically integrating at half precision with stochastic rounding. Areas of the model which notably improve due to the inclusion of stochastic over deterministic rounding are also explored and discussed. [abridged]