JimD, I don’t know how to answer you. All scales are important in fluid dynamics. Just capturing the main energy transfers tells you nothing about feedbacks like clouds for example. These depend on the subgrid scale effects. I know models are checked against data. My impression is that the correspondence is not very good at decadal scales. How good it is at century scales is unknown because of lack of data . I do note that the models have changed a lot in terms of their predictions over just the last 30 years. One thing that concerns me is Isaac Held’s recent work on convection that shows that the subgrid details can have a big effect on the larger scales. Generally, it would be a miracle if the subgrid scales did not impact the resolved scales. You can read about Reynolds’ averaging for example to see some of the issues. The effects go both ways.
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