Simulations with earth system model EC-Earth 3.2
Title: Simulations with earth system model EC-Earth 3.2
DNr: SNIC 2017/8-1
Project Type: DCS
Principal Investigator: Qiong Zhang <qiong.zhang@natgeo.su.se>
Affiliation: Stockholms universitet
Duration: 2017-11-29 – 2020-07-01
Classification: 10501 10508 10509
Keywords:

Abstract

Within a collaboration in Bolin Centre for climate research in Stockholm University, we have run a series of sensitivity experiments with EC-Earth 3.1 during 2016. These simulations have shown the importance of the interaction between different forcings such as vegetation and dust on local and global climate. Several regional climate responses such as Arctic, tropical Pacific have been investigated and and Several publications are published/submitted and in preparation based on these simulations. The data have been shared within the PMIP community and regional model downscaling group. By doing this we have established several national and Nordic collaborations on climate modelling and been involved in several relevant proposal applications. Our published paper on Green Sahara have stimulated large interest in research community. Several groups have requested our simulation data and attempted to interpret their proxy data or hypothesis in certain region or certain aspects. Considering this situation that further analyses on the model output are still needed, we decide to keep the data until the relevant scientific results are published. Recently we have received a VR grant on ‘Simulating the green Sahara with an Earth System Model’ for the period 2018-2021. Within this project we plan to run a 2000 years transient simulation with coupled EC-Earth 3.2 and LPJ-GUESS, as well as several sensitivity simulations to test the different hypothese on interaction between climate and ecosystem. To launch such a long transient simulation, first we need to do a set of testing runs for the coupled version. All these runs will produce huge amount of output, which has high demand on data storage. We have committed to run the core experiments of PMIP4, which is part of the CMIP6. These committed experiments include mid-Holocene (6000 years ago), Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago), Last interglacial (127,000 years ago), Last millennium (850-1850 D), and mid-Pliocene (3.2 million years ago). We plan to run these simulations with low-resolution version of EC-Earth 3.2 (T159L62, ORAC1). The standard output will be stored via S-CMIP project. We foresee some variables that are not required by CMIP6 (e.g. high frequency output needed for regional model downscaling etc) but are needed in other specific projects therefore the data need to be stored. Our another effort is to implement the stable water isotope into our climate model and trace every step of hydrological cycle in climate system. Such efforts may lead to a direct comparison/verification of measured water isotopes signals in paleo proxy data, also be able to draw a regional/global picture on past climate change. The first step will be implementing the stable water isotope into atmospheric model IFS, and later in land model and ocean model. A further ambitious plan is to develop an offline tracer model which is independent to any climate model. This is a challenge work especially with atmospheric model regarding the convection schemes. We have started the coding work with OpenIFS now.