Process study is the phenomenological approach used in climatology.
Process studies are used "to develop the parameterizations [e.g. of circulation models], and observations [are] used to calibrate [the latter]".
[1] A parametrization is a set of fitted equations to represent physical phenomena instead of deducing them from first principals.
An example for a parametrized phenomenon are thunderstorms which cannot be simulated within a circulation model if the spatial resolution of several km is too coarse to resolve single storm cell.
There is a journal entitled Process Studies.