Introduction¶
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is an international climate modelling project, designed to better understand past, present and future changes in the climate.
A climate model is a complex computer code that creates a digital analogue to Earth. This model digitises the processes and interactions between parts of Earth’s climate system: the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, cryosphere and biosphere. We use models to experiment how future changes in human activities will impact the Earth’s future climate, how much it warms, how floods, droughts and other extremes will change.
However, many processes in our climate occur on such small scales, that models are not able to exactly represent them in models, and therefore some simplifications are required. How we simplify the climate system is unique to each model. Therefore comparing simulations from different models is useful for understanding which results are consistent across models, and which results are less agreed upon. Since 1995, CMIP has been coordinating this model intercomparison across the climate science community.
This multi-model approach helps to evaluate climate models, leads to improvements in the model simulations and provides a better understanding of past, present and future climates. One additional strength of CMIP lies in its global infrastructure which has gathered the data and gives open access for a growing global research community.
CMIP has grown from a modest scientific research initiative in the early nineties to become a global enterprise: more than 50 modelling centres around the world are participating in the sixth phase of CMIP, CMIP6. Many hundreds of scientific papers have already been published and the results are taken into account for policy decisions.
CMIP has been organised in different phases, each with new and improved climate model experiment protocols, standards, and data distribution mechanisms. CMIP6 is the most recent phase to release its modelling output data for general use, whilst the latest phase, CMIP7 is in its earliest organisational stages.
Visit WCRP-CMIP for more information.
Helpful Links:¶
CMIP Phases: WCRP-CMIP PhasesWCRP-CMIP Github: WCRP-CMIPCMIP Data Access: WCRP-CMIP Data Access