Overview of the Chinese National Key Basic Research Project Entitled “Development and Evaluation of High-Resolution Climate System Models”

Abstract

An overview of the Chinese National Key Basic Research Project entitled “Development and Evaluation of High-Resolution Climate System Models” under grant No. 2010CB951900 is presented. The background and the objectives of the project are introduced. The main progress made in the past 5 years of the project is the development of “one system” and “two platforms”, where “one system” refers to the high-resolution modeling system and “two platforms” refers to the multi-model ensemble coupling platform and model evaluation system. The technical details of the high-resolution modeling system and multi-model ensemble coupling platform are summarized. For the model evaluation system, instead of presenting the details of the metrics used in gauging model performances, the observational metrics are used to assess the climate models developed in this project that employ low, middle, and high resolutions. The strengths and weaknesses of adopting a higher model resolution are identified and discussed.