The Community Climate System Model: CCSM3
A new version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) has been developed and released to the climate community. CCSM3 is a coupled climate model with components representing the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land surface connected by a flux coupler. CCSM3 is designed to produce realistic simulations over a wide range of spatial resolutions, enabling inexpensive simulations lasting several millennia or detailed studies of continental-scale climate change. This paper will show results from the configuration used for climate-change simulations with a T85 grid for atmosphere and land and a 1-degree grid for ocean and sea-ice. The new system incorporates several significant improvements in the scientific formulation. The enhancements in the model physics are designed to reduce or eliminate several systematic biases in the mean climate produced by previous editions of CCSM. These include new treatments of cloud processes, aerosol radiative forcing, land-atmosphere fluxes, ocean mixed-layer processes, and sea-ice dynamics. There are significant improvements in the sea-ice thickness, polar radiation budgets, equatorial sea-surface temperatures, ocean currents, cloud radiative effects, and ENSO teleconnections. CCSM3 can produce stable climate simulations of millenial duration without ad hoc adjustments to the fluxes exchanged among the component models. Nonetheless, there are still systematic biases in the ocean-atmosphere fluxes in western coastal regions, the spectrum of ENSO variability, the spatial distribution of precipitation in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the continental precipitation and surface air temperatures. We conclude with the prospects for extending CCSM to a more comprehensive model of the Earth's climate system.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 892794
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-JRNL-208789; TRN: US200623%%585
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Climate, vol. 19, n/a, June 1, 2006, pp. 2122-2143, Journal Name: Journal of Climate, vol. 19, n/a, June 1, 2006, pp. 2122-2143
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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