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CMIP Resource Bank

About CMIP

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is an international climate modelling project, designed to better understand past, present and future changes in the climate.

A climate model is a complex computer code that creates a digital analogue to Earth. This model digitises the processes and interactions between parts of Earth’s climate system: the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, cryosphere and biosphere. We use models to experiment how future changes in human activities will impact the Earth’s future climate, how much it warms, how floods, droughts and other extremes will change.

However, many processes in our climate occur on such small scales, that models are not able to exactly represent them in models, and therefore some simplifications are required. How we simplify the climate system is unique to each model. Therefore, comparing simulations from different models is useful for understanding which results are consistent across models, and which results are less agreed upon. Since 1995, CMIP has been coordinating this model intercomparison across the climate science community. This multi-model approach helps to evaluate climate models, leads to improvements in the model simulations and provides a better understanding of past, present and future climates. One additional strength of CMIP lies in its global infrastructure which has gathered the data and gives open access for a growing global research community.

CMIP has grown from a modest scientific research initiative in the early nineties to become a global enterprise: more than 50 modelling centres around the world are participating in the sixth phase of CMIP, CMIP6. Many hundreds of scientific papers have already been published and the results are taken into account for policy decisions.

CMIP has been organised in different phases, each with new and improved climate model experiment protocols, standards, and data distribution mechanisms. CMIP6 is the most recent phase to release its modelling output data for general use, whilst the latest phase, CMIP7 is in its earliest organisational stages.

CMIP is a project of the World Climate Researcher Programme (WCRP), providing climate projections to understand past, present, and future climate changes. It is part of the WCRP Earth System Modelling and Observations (ESMO) Core Project, which was formed to coordinate all modelling, data, and observation activities across WCRP and its key partners.

Under the guidance and at the direction of the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM), CMIP activities are overseen by a coordinated pair of subcommittees: the CMIP Panel and the WGCM Infrastructure Panel (WIP).This continued collaboration of climate scientists has resulted in CMIP knowledge being extended across the world. The CMIP website provides a one-stop shop for key resources, events, news, and information for the CMIP community. If there is any information you cannot find on these webpages, please see our FAQs and community-led Q&A forum.

A list of useful resources and explainers can also be found below.

CMIP Data Access and Version Control

CMIP data is hosted on the Earth System Federation Grid (ESGF). Read more about CMIP data access and the ESGF by following this link. During this Climatematch Academy course, you will have accessed data on the cloud, via Pangeo. This can be a useful way to access data quickly, without needing to download large files to your local computer. There are other platforms which also enable you to use the CMIP data in a similar way. Some of these have restricted access to certain groups of people:

While cloud-based access servers are an incredibly useful tool for accessing and analysing CMIP data, they aren’t always kept up-to-date with the latest versions of the data. Due to the volume of data modelling centres produce, errors in the data can happen. When errors are detected, they are logged in the Errata system. It is important to regularly check Errata for any potential issues with the data you have downloaded. Current issues submitted to the Errata system can be found here. Searches can be made through the Project (CMIP5/CMIP6), Experiment ID, Institution ID, Source ID, Variable ID, issue severity, and issue status (e.g. new/solved).

For all non-ESGF data access routes, we encourage users to verify that the data used is the latest version, and whether any issues have been logged for the data you are using. This can be checked via Errata.

Useful CMIP Guidance