The Community Earth System Model

[Jim Hunt]

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.

CESM is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Administration of the CESM is maintained by the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The source code for CESM releases is distributed through a public Subversion code repository.

[Jim Hunt]

By way of introduction to CESM, here's a cross post from the "The Distributed Arctic Sea Ice Model" thread:

Why trust climate models? According to Ars Technica "It's a matter of Simple Science"!

It's possible that shrinking sea ice in the Arctic could increase snowfall over Siberia, pushing the jet stream southward, creating summer high pressures in Europe that allow India’s monsoon rains to linger, and on it goes… It's hard to examine those connections in the real world, but it's much easier to see how things play out in a climate model.

The article explains the inner workings of climate models, with the emphasis on the Community Earth System Model. Here's one of the graphics:



Courtesy of Kate Alexander and Steve Easterbrook.

Those links are well worth exploring too.

[Jim Hunt]

Not CESM specific, but nonetheless an interesting introduction to climate models at Carbon Brief:

"How do climate models work?"

[icefisher]

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has released data sets used under CESM2-WACCM CMIP6 modelling at (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/).   Sorry that the link is not activated.  Do not remember how it is done.  For those with modelling experience search URL results can be returned as XML or JSON.