Little attention has been given to the impact of discretization error on twin experiments in the stochastic form of the Lorenz-96 equations when the dynamics are fully resolved but random. In this paper, Colin Grudzien, Alberto Carrassi and myself study a simple form of the stochastically forced Lorenz-96 equations that is amenable to higher-order time-discretization schemes in order to investigate these effects. We provide numerical benchmarks for the overall discretization error, in the strong and weak sense, for several commonly used integration schemes and compare these methods for biases introduced into ensemble-based statistics and filtering performance. The distinction between strong and weak convergence of the numerical schemes is focused on, highlighting which of the two concepts is relevant based on the problem at hand. Using the above analysis, we suggest a mathematically consistent framework for the treatment of these discretization errors in ensemble forecasting and data assimilation twin experiments for unbiased and computationally efficient benchmark studies.

The paper, entitled On the numerical integration of the Lorenz-96 model, with scalar additive noise, for benchmark twin experiments, is published (open access) in Geoscientific Model Development.