The ACCESS coupled model: documentation of core CMIP5 simulations and initial results

Dix, Martin; Vohralik, Peter; Bi, Daohua; Rashid, Harun; Marsland, Simon J.; O’Farrell, Siobhan; Uotila, Petteri; Hirst, Tony; Kowalczyk, Eva; Sullivan, Arnold; Yan, Hailin; Franklin, Charmaine; Sun, Zhian; Watterson, I. G.; Collier, Mark; Noonan, Julie; Rotstayn, Leon; Stevens, Lauren; Uhe, Peter; Puri, Kamal

doi:10.22499/2.6301.006

Cited by 84 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…The ocean climate diagnostic suite presented here is useful for evaluating the quality of the simulations, and also for assessing the future evolution of climate under the prescribed CMIP5 forcing protocols. The results presented here should be considered as a complement to other analyses of ACCESS1.0 and ACCESS1.3 that appear in this special issue: namely the sea-ice study of Uotila et al (2013); the overview of Bi et al (2013a); the atmospheric model assessments of Dix et al (2013), Rashid et al (2013a) and Watterson et al (2013); the El Niño Southern Oscillation analysis of Rashid et al (2013b); and the land surface evaluation of Kowalczyk et al (2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…The ACCESS-CM experiments considered here are referred to according to the nomenclature of Taylor et al (2012) as the piControl, historical, rcp45, rcp85, 1pctCO2, and abrupt4xCO2 simulations. Details of the experimental design for these six experiments, along with the forcings used, are given in the Dix et al (2013) paper in this issue of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal (AMOJ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluation of ACCESS climate model ocean diagnostics in CMIP5 simulations

Marsland¹,

Bi²,

Uotila³

et al. 2013

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Global and regional diagnostics are used to evaluate the ocean performance of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator coupled model (ACCESS-CM) contributions to the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). Two versions of ACCESS-CM have been submitted to CMIP; namely CSIRO-BOM ACCESS1.0 and CSIRO-BOM ACCESS1.3. Results from six of the core CMIP5 experiments (piControl, historical, rcp45, rcp85, 1pctCO2, and abrupt4xCO2) are evaluated for each of the two ACCESS-CM model versions. Overall, both model versions exhibit a reasonable and stable representation of key diagnostics of ocean climate performance in the pre-industrial control simulations, including a meridional overturning circulation with North Atlantic Deep Water maxima in the range 22-24 Sv, and a poleward heat transport maximum of around 1.5 PW. For the projected climate change scenarios considered the ACCESS-CM results are in reasonable agreement with responses found in other CMIP models, with the familiar ocean warming, and reduction in strength of meridional overturning and poleward heat transport. Drifts in the control simulations of both global ocean salinity and global sea-level are opposite in sign for ACCESS1.0 and ACCESS1.3, suggesting problems exist in the closure of the hydrological cycle. The simulation of ocean climate change over the historical period shows a weak response compared to observations, which manifests as a late response of ocean warming and sea level rise starting around 1990 in the model, compared to the mid 1960s in observations. Further historical simulations are underway to ascertain if this late response in ACCESS is a robust model feature, or just low frequency variability. If the weak response over the historical period proves robust, the likely cause is a too strong cooling from atmospheric aerosols. Broadening the set of experiments to further investigate the relative warming response of the ACCESS-CM to greenhouse gases compared to the cooling response to aerosols is underway, and preliminary results do suggest that the cooling due to aerosols is strong in the historical simulations. ACCESS-CM are given in Bi et al. (2013a), and summarised here in Table 1 for completeness.Coupled model contributions to CMIP5 provide an opportunity to evaluate an extensive set of key global and regional diagnostics of ocean performance relevant to the climate system. Our choice of model diagnostics, while not comprehensive, is aimed to illustrate the ACCESS-CM performance in terms of key integrals of global ocean climate (e.g. meridional overturning circulation and poleward heat transport), that demonstrate both the level of stability of the control simulations, and the response to climate change forcing scenarios. We benefit from the availability of a large suite of outputs as was recommended by the World Climate Research Program Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Working Group on Ocean Model Development (WGOMD) to the development of the CMIP5 protocols (Griffies et al. 2009a). Our choi...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of ACCESS climate model ocean diagnostics in CMIP5 simulations

Marsland¹,

Bi²,

Uotila³

et al. 2013

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“…The climate model version underlying the ESM version is ACCESS1.4, a minor update of the AC-CESS1.3 version submitted to CMIP5 Dix et al, 2013). The relationship between the ACCESS1.3, AC-CESS1.4 and ACCESS-ESM1 versions is illustrated in Law et al (2017, Fig.…”

Section: Model Configurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The carbon cycle in the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-ESM1) – Part 2: Historical simulations

et al. 2017

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Abstract. Over the last decade many climate models have evolved into Earth system models (ESMs), which are able to simulate both physical and biogeochemical processes through the inclusion of additional components such as the carbon cycle. The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) has been recently extended to include land and ocean carbon cycle components in its ACCESS-ESM1 version. A detailed description of ACCESS-ESM1 components including results from pre-industrial simulations is provided in Part 1. Here, we focus on the evaluation of ACCESS-ESM1 over the historical period in terms of its capability to reproduce climate and carbon-related variables. Comparisons are performed with observations, if available, but also with other ESMs to highlight common weaknesses. We find that climate variables controlling the exchange of carbon are well reproduced. However, the aerosol forcing in ACCESS-ESM1 is somewhat larger than in other models, which leads to an overly strong cooling response in the land from about 1960 onwards. The land carbon cycle is evaluated for two scenarios: running with a prescribed leaf area index (LAI) and running with a prognostic LAI. We overestimate the seasonal mean (1.7 vs. 1.4) and peak amplitude (2.0 vs. 1.8) of the prognostic LAI at the global scale, which is common amongst CMIP5 ESMs. However, the prognostic LAI is our preferred choice, because it allows for the vegetation feedback through the coupling between LAI and the leaf carbon pool. Our globally integrated land-atmosphere flux over the historical period is 98 PgC for prescribed LAI and 137 PgC for prognostic LAI, which is in line with estimates of land use emissions (ACCESS-ESM1 does not include land use change).The integrated ocean-atmosphere flux is 83 PgC, which is in agreement with a recent estimate of 82 PgC from the Global Carbon Project for the period 1959-2005. The seasonal cycle of simulated atmospheric CO 2 is close to the observed seasonal cycle (up to 1 ppm difference for the station at Mace Head and up to 2 ppm for the station at Mauna Loa), but shows a larger amplitude (up to 6 ppm) in the high northern latitudes. Overall, ACCESS-ESM1 performs well over the historical period, making it a useful tool to explore the change in land and oceanic carbon uptake in the future.

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“…The atmospheric component for ACCESS1.0 is based on the Met Office Hadley Centre model HadGEM2 (version r1.1) while the component for ACCESS1.3 is based on the Met Office's subsequent Global Atmosphere (GA) 1.0. For further details see Bi et al (2013), Dix et al (2013), Rashid et al (2013), and Watterson et al (2013).…”

Section: Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relative performance of Australian CMIP5 models based on rainfall and ENSO metrics

Smith¹,

Syktus²,

Rotstayn³

et al. 2013

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We assess the performance of 30 CMIP5 and two CMIP3 models using metrics based on an all-Australia average rainfall and NINO3.4 sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The assessment provides an insight into the relative performance of the models at simulating long-term average monthly mean values, interannual variability and the seasonal cycles. It also includes a measure of the ability to capture observed rainfall-NINO3.4 SST correlations. In general, the rainfall features are reasonably simulated and there is relatively little difference amongst the models but the NINO3.4 SST features appear more difficult to simulate as evidenced by the greater range in metric scores. We find little evidence of consistency in the sense that a relatively good metric score for one feature does not imply a relatively good score for another related (but independent) feature. The assessment indicates that more recent models perform slightly better than their predecessors, especially with regard to the NINO3.4 metrics. We also focus on the ability of models to reproduce the observed seasonal cycle of rainfall-SST correlations since this is a direct indicator of a model's potential utility for seasonal forecasting over Australia. This indicates some relatively good models (CNRM, HadGEM2-ESM, MPI-ESM-LR and MPI-ESM-MR) and some relatively poor models (CSIRO-Mk3.5, FGOALS, GISS-E2-HP1 and INMCM4). We find that the ACCESS1.3 and CSIRO-Mk3.6 models rank as near median performers on this metric and represent improvements over their predecessors (ACCESS1.0, CSIRO-Mk3.0 and CSIRO-Mk3.5).

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The ACCESS coupled model: documentation of core CMIP5 simulations and initial results

Cited by 84 publications

References 76 publications

Evaluation of ACCESS climate model ocean diagnostics in CMIP5 simulations

Evaluation of ACCESS climate model ocean diagnostics in CMIP5 simulations

The carbon cycle in the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-ESM1) – Part 2: Historical simulations

The relative performance of Australian CMIP5 models based on rainfall and ENSO metrics

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