S-CMIP: Swedish climate modelling and contributions to international projects
Abstract
The central motivation for climate modeling is to describe the responses of the Earth’s non-linear climate system to changes in forcing and to understand its internal variability and related processes. Scientific progress in these areas and in the science of prediction and projection methods will enable actionable information on climate change in the fields of climate change adaptation (adjustment to a new climate) and mitigation (control of greenhouse gas emissions and land use).
International climate simulations to address the above questions are coordinated largely under the framework of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. The CMIP standards and infrastructure, such as data upload to CMIPs data grid (ESGF), are increasingly used for projects beyond CMIP as well, which is boosting international across-model climate studies. Simulations of the 6th phase of CMIP have largely come to an end but the developments in Earth System Models (ESMs) are used for additional simulations to further explore outcomes from CMIP6 and more detailed process studies to further improve our understanding of the Earth system and its ongoing and future change in a range of national and international projects.
At the same time development of the next generation of ESMs starts with a view on contributing to the next round of CMIP, CMIP7, currently under discussion.
S-CMIP will carry out calculations connected to research projects funded by EU-H2020, EU-HORIZON, VR and Formas. These cover understanding and modeling of processes in the Earth system, development of a new generation of ESM, exploration of the predictability and uncertainty of climate change, millennium and paleo time scale studies, emission pathways that avoid climate tipping points, the fate of emitted carbon in the climate system, the understanding of climate extremes and regional processes in the future. All these projects are externally scientifically reviewed, are considered state of the art and are expected to generate publications by S-CMIP members.
Simulations will be coordinated in the consortium for optimal usage of the resources.
The backbone of the research group are two Strategic research areas (SRA), the Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University (SU), with Rossby Centre at SMHI as a partner, and the “ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system” (MERGE) network coordinated by Lund University (LU) including Gothenburg University (GU) and the Rossby Centre. The Rossby Centre at SMHI is the national hub of climate model development and application of climate models for research purposes. Uppsala University (UU) is integrated in this collaboration with process simulations.
