Abstract
Abstract. The CSIRO Mk3L climate system model is a coupled general circulation model, designed primarily for millennial-scale climate simulations and palaeoclimate research. Mk3L includes components which describe the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and land surface, and combines computational efficiency with a stable and realistic control climatology. This paper describes the model physics and software, analyses the control climatology, and evaluates the ability of the model to simulate the modern climate. Mk3L incorporates a spectral atmospheric general circulation model, a z-coordinate ocean general circulation model, a dynamic-thermodynamic sea ice model and a land surface scheme with static vegetation. The source code is highly portable, and has no dependence upon proprietary software. The model distribution is freely available to the research community. A 1000-yr climate simulation can be completed in around one-and-a-half months on a typical desktop computer, with greater throughput being possible on high-performance computing facilities. Mk3L produces realistic simulations of the larger-scale features of the modern climate, although with some biases on the regional scale. The model also produces reasonable representations of the leading modes of internal climate variability in both the tropics and extratropics. The control state of the model exhibits a high degree of stability, with only a weak cooling trend on millennial timescales. Ongoing development work aims to improve the model climatology and transform Mk3L into a comprehensive earth system model.
Highlights
The CSIRO Mk3L climate system model is a computationally-efficient atmosphere-land-sea ice-ocean general circulation model, designed for the study of climate variability and change on millennial timescales
The atmosphere, land and sea ice models are reduced-resolution versions of those used by the CSIRO Mk3 coupled model (Gordon et al, 2002), which contributed towards CMIP3 (Meehl et al, 2007) and the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Solomon et al, 2007)
This paper describes version 1.0 of the CSIRO Mk3L climate system model, analyses the control climatology, and evaluates the ability of the model to simulate the modern climate
Summary
The CSIRO Mk3L climate system model is a computationally-efficient atmosphere-land-sea ice-ocean general circulation model, designed for the study of climate variability and change on millennial timescales. It represents a new version of the CSIRO climate model, the history of which is described by Smith (2007). The atmosphere, land and sea ice models are reduced-resolution versions of those used by the CSIRO Mk3 coupled model (Gordon et al, 2002), which contributed towards CMIP3 (Meehl et al, 2007) and the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Solomon et al, 2007). As well as further information regarding the initial development of Mk3L, is provided by Phipps (2006a)
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