This study compares CL51 ceilometer observations made at Scott Base, Antarctica, with statistics from the ERA5, JRA55, and MERRA2 reanalyses. To enhance the comparison we use a lidar instrument simulator to derive cloud statistics from the reanalyses which account for instrumental factors. The cloud occurrence in the three reanalyses is slightly overestimated above 3km, but displays a larger underestimation below 3 km relative to observations. Unlike previous studies, we see no relationship between relative humidity and cloud occurrence biases, suggesting that the cloud biases do not result from the representation of moisture. We also show that the seasonal variation of cloud occurrence and cloud fraction, defined as the vertically integrated cloud occurrence, are small in both the observations and the reanalyses. We also examine the quality of the cloud representation for a set of synoptic states derived from ERA5 surface winds. The variability associated with grouping cloud occurrence based on synoptic state is much larger than the seasonal variation, highlighting synoptic state is a strong control of cloud occurrence. All the reanalyses continue to display underestimates below 3km and overestimates above 3km for each synoptic state. But, the variability in ERA5 statistics matches the changes in the observations better than the other reanalyses. We also use a machine learning scheme to estimate the quantity of super-cooled liquid water cloud from the ceilometer observations. Ceilometer low-level super-cooled liquid water cloud occurrences are considerably larger than values derived from the reanalyses, further highlighting the poor representation of low-level clouds in the reanalyses.

Contemporary general circulation models (GCMs) and Earth system models (ESMs) are developed by a large number of modeling groups globally. They use a wide range of representations of physical processes, allowing for structural (code) uncertainty to be partially quantified with multi-model ensembles (MMEs). Many models in the MMEs of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) have a common development history due to sharing of code and schemes. This makes their projections statistically dependent and introduces biases in MME statistics. Previous research has focused on model output and code dependence, and model code genealogy of CMIP models has not been fully analyzed. We present a full reconstruction of CMIP3, CMIP5 and CMIP6 code genealogy of 167 atmospheric models, GCMs, and ESMs (of which 114 participated in CMIP) based on the available literature, with a focus on the atmospheric component and atmospheric physics. We identify 12 main model families. We propose family and code weighting methods designed to reduce the effect of model structural dependence in MMEs. We analyze weighted effective climate sensitivity (ECS), climate feedbacks, forcing, and global mean near-surface air temperature, and how they differ by model family. Models in the same family often have similar climate properties. We show that weighting can partially reconcile differences in ECS and cloud feedbacks between CMIP5 and CMIP6. The results can help in understanding structural dependence between CMIP models, and the proposed code and family weighting methods can be used in MME assessments to ameliorate model structural sampling biases.