Coupled model intercomparison project

In climatology, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a framework and the analog of the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) for global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. CMIP began in 1995 under the auspices of the Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM), which is in turn under auspices of CLIVAR and the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Program.

The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supports CMIP by helping WGCM to determine the scope of the project, by maintaining the project's data base and by participating in data analysis. CMIP has received model output from the pre-industrial climate simulations ("control runs") and 1% per year increasing-CO₂ simulations of about 30 coupled GCMs. More recent phases of the project (20C3M, ...) include more realistic scenarios of climate forcing for both historical, paleoclimate and future scenarios.

Phase 5

The most recently completed phase of the project (2010-2014) is CMIP5.

CMIP5 included more metadata describing model simulations than previous phases. The METAFOR project created an exhaustive schema describing the scientific, technical, and numerical aspects of CMIP runs which was archived along with the output data.

In 2014 a new estimate for solar irradiation added corrections for scattering and diffraction. These corrected a component of the quasi-annual signal and increased the signal to noise ratio, respectively. The corrections decreased the average TSI value without affecting the trending in the ACRIM Composite TSI. The corrections established an increase of +0.037%/decade from 1980 to 2000 and a decrease thereafter. Significant declines can be seen during the peak of solar cycles 21 and 22. Solar forcing of climate change may thus be a significantly larger factor than represented in CMIP5.

See also

• Climate model

External links

• Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
• An Overview of Results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
• CMIP5 Project
• CMIP5 Data Availability