Documenting Climate Models and Their Simulations

Journal Article · Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013 · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00035.1· OSTI ID:1376038

Guilyardi, Eric ^[1]; Balaji, V. ^[2]; Lawrence, Bryan ^[3]; Callaghan, Sarah ^[4]; Deluca, Cecelia ^[5]; Denvil, Sébastien ^[6]; Lautenschlager, Michael ^[7]; Morgan, Mark ^[6]; Murphy, Sylvia ^[5]; Taylor, Karl E. ^[8]

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1. Univ. of Reading (United Kingdom); UMR Laboratory of Oceanography and Climate Experiments and Digital Approaches (LOCEAN), Paris (France)
2. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
3. Univ. of Reading (United Kingdom); Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Didcot (United Kingdom)
4. Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Didcot (United Kingdom)
5. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States)
6. International Partnership for Service (IPSL), Paris (France)
7. German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), Hamburg (Germany)
8. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), Livermore, CA (United States)

The results of climate models are of increasing and widespread importance. No longer is climate model output of sole interest to climate scientists and researchers in the climate change impacts and adaptation fields. Now nonspecialists such as government officials, policy makers, and the general public all have an increasing need to access climate model output and understand its implications. For this host of users, accurate and complete metadata (i.e., information about how and why the data were produced) is required to document the climate modeling results. We describe a pilot community initiative to collect and make available documentation of climate models and their simulations. In an initial application, a metadata repository is being established to provide information of this kind for a major internationally coordinated modeling activity known as CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5). We expected that for a wide range of stakeholders, this and similar community-managed metadata repositories will spur development of analysis tools that facilitate discovery and exploitation of Earth system simulations.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 1376038
• Report Number(s): LLNL-JRNL-582994
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 94, Issue 5; ISSN 0003-0007
• Publisher: American Meteorological Society
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
58 GEOSCIENCES