Mission: to develop and evaluate climate system models for understanding, assessing and predicting Earth climate change and variations
The development and evaluation
of global climate models is an important unifying component of WCRP,
building on scientific and technical advances in the more discipline-oriented
activities. These models are the fundamental tool for understanding
and predicting natural climate variations and providing reliable
predictions of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Models
also provide an essential means of exploiting and synthesizing in
a synergistic manner all relevant atmospheric, oceanographic, cryospheric
and land-surface data collected in WCRP and other programmes. The Working
Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE), jointly sponsored
by the WCRP and the WMO
Commission for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS), leads the development
of atmospheric models for both climate studies and numerical weather
prediction.
In addition, the Working
Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) leads the development of coupled
ocean/atmosphere/land models used for climate studies on longer
time-scales. WGCM is also WCRP's link to the Earth system modelling
in IGBP's Analysis, Integration
and Modeling of the Earth System (AIMES) and to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Activities in this area concentrate
on the identification of errors in model climate simulations and
exploring the means for their reduction by organizing coordinated
model experiments under standard conditions. Under the auspices
of the WCRP, the Atmospheric
Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) has facilitated controlled
simulations of the ten-year period 1979-1988 by thirty different
atmospheric models under specified conditions. The comparison of
the results with observations has shown the capability of many models
to represent adequately mean seasonal states and large-scale interannual
variability.
Examples of WCRP Modelling accomplishments:
> World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction, jointly organized by WCRP, IGBP, and the WWRP (6-9 May 2008, Reading, UK) was organised to develop a strategy to revolutionise prediction of the climate through the 21st century to help address the threat of climate change. The establishment of the World Climate Research Facility was proposed as part of the Climate Prediction Project (download Workshop Report).
> The latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) was initiated in 2004. In 2005, WCRP facilitated the collection, archive and access to all the global climate model simulations undertaken for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). This third phase of CMIP (CMIP3) involved an unprecedented set of 20th and 21st century coordinated climate change experiments from 16 groups in 11 countries with 23 global coupled climate models. About 31 terabytes of model data were collected at the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI). The model data are openly available, and have been accessed by over 1200 scientists who have produced over 200 peer-reviewed papers. Currently, the fifth phase of CMIP (CMIP5) is under development. The grand challenge of new set of climate models examined in CMIP5 is to resolve regional climate changes, particularly in the next few decades, to which human societies will have to adapt, and to quantify the magnitudes of the feedbacks in the climate system, such as feedbacks in the carbon cycle (see media release).
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