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What are some of the state of the art models for climate simulation? I'm looking for downloadable source codes.

For example in meteorological research I'm personally familiar with WRF, the Weather Research Forecasting model developed by NCAR (among others). What is an equivalent code for long range forecasts?

Follow-up question - how much code is shared (if any) between meteorological and climate simulation codes? I understand that the models must differ for efficiency and conservation issues but certainly the problems must overlap a bit.

MRocklin
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  • +1 from me... Wonder what AR5 will bring. http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/ March 15, 2013: By this date papers cited by WG1 must be published or accepted. – Deer Hunter Mar 15 '13 at 09:17
  • NCAR also has the Community Earth System Model (CESM): http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/ – Paul Mar 15 '13 at 15:19
  • A related plea, short questions. Can someone please make a forecast@home (like seti@home) distributed/parallel (with graphical rendering)? How many participants/bandwidth would be needed to match the supercomputers used in official forecasts? – Jason Kleban Nov 25 '13 at 22:03

2 Answers2

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The Community Earth System Model gets a lot of use.

Bill Barth
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CESM and COSMOS have been mentioned. A group in Japan has their own model, although I forget what it's called. If you really need a comprehensive list and a comparison, I'd recommend taking a look at any of the papers published in CMIP project. Our's (COSMOS) is in there and you can see where each model has its weaknesses.

Just as a clarification question, what sort of data are you looking for? Climate models differ a lot in what sort of things they do and don't include. Some have ice components, some have chemistry, some have aerosols and dust, etc etc...

As to the follow up question -- Meteorological and Climate models are extremely similar. In fact, you can run an Atmospheric simulation in "weather mode" and get (sortof) realistic weather patterns. The key difference, however, is the time step and length of model integration. Climate deals with long term averages of a system in both space and time, whereas weather is principally concerned with what may be happening over a week or two in a very local region. As an example, you wouldn't bother looking up the weather in Virginia if you lived in Florida.

Dan
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pgierz
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    Welcome to SciComp. Thank you for posting reading suggestions and for disclosing your affiliation. If you edit your sloppy and vague statement on 'the Japanese', I will be completely happy. – Jan Aug 02 '13 at 08:22
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    The group I was referring to is based in Tokyo and uses MIROC. Another good resource is https://verc.enes.org, a fairly comprehensive list of climate models used in the European Union. – pgierz Aug 02 '13 at 17:28