The DOE E3SM Coupled Model Version 1: Overview and Evaluation at Standard Resolution

By J. Golaz, Peter M. Caldwell, Luke P. van Roekel, Mark R. Petersen, Q. Tang, J. Wolfe, G. Abeshu, V. Anantharaj, Xylar Asay-Davis, D. Bader and 74 more. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 2019

589 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This work documents the first version of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) new Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SMv1). We focus on the standard resolution of the fully coupled physical model designed to address DOE mission‐relevant water cycle questions. Its components include atmosphere and land (110‐km grid spacing), ocean and sea ice (60 km in the midlatitudes and 30 km at the equator and poles), and river transport (55 km) models. This base configuration will also serve as a foundation for additional configurations exploring higher horizontal resolution as well as augmented capabilities in the form of biogeochemistry and cryosphere configurations. The performance of E3SMv1 is evaluated by means of a standard set of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) Diagnosis, Evaluation, and Characterization of Klima simulations consisting of a long preindustrial control, historical simulations (ensembles of fully coupled and prescribed SSTs) as well as idealized CO2 forcing simulations. The model performs well overall with biases typical of other CMIP‐class models, although the simulated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weaker than many CMIP‐class models. While the E3SMv1 historical ensemble captures the bulk of the observed warming between preindustrial (1850) and present day, the trajectory of the warming diverges from observations in the second half of the twentieth century with a period of delayed warming followed by an excessive warming trend. Using a two‐layer energy balance model, we attribute this divergence to the model's strong aerosol‐related effective radiative forcing (ERFari+aci = −1.65 W/m2) and high equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS = 5.3 K).

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52ac6a0d14bc2ba9aa0ef17ef78291923537e24e

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Citations in the corpus

Quantifying Progress Across Different CMIP Phases With the ESMValTool (2020, background): “ukmo_hadcm3 ukmo_hadgem1 Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research/Met Office, UK Gordon et al. (2000); Martin et al.”
Assessment of Sea Ice Extent in CMIP6 With Comparison to Observations and CMIP5 (2020, background): “The large biases in the CAMS‐CSM1‐0 and E3SMmodels are possibly due to the models' underestimation of the northward ocean heat transport associated with low strength of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Golaz et al., 2019; Wei et al., 2018).”
The DOE E3SM Coupled Model Version 1: Description and Results at High Resolution (2019, methodology): “Biases in LRtunedHR SST and SSS look very similar to those shown for LRv1 in Golaz et al. (2019), implying that the aforementioned issues are intrinsic to the low-resolution version of the model rather than the result of poor atmosphere tuning.”
Improved Diurnal Cycle of Precipitation in E3SM With a Revised Convective Triggering Function (2019, methodology): “It was able to capture the nocturnal elevated convection systems observed over the ARM SGP site in a single‐column model test with the U.S. DOE's Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM; Golaz et al., 2019).”
Resolving and Parameterising the Ocean Mesoscale in Earth System Models (2020, background): “…of SST in ESMs demonstrates errors that are broadly similar across a range of models with cooling in the North Pacific, warming in the Southern Ocean, warming in the Eastern Boundary Upwelling zones, and a patch of very cold water ( ‘ blue spot ’ ) in the North Atlantic [26, 28, 29, 91, 100].”
Simulations for CMIP6 With the AWI Climate Model AWI‐CM‐1‐1 (2020, background): “Features such as the Gulf of Mexico and Bay of Bengal salinity biases are in common with E3SM.”
Reduced global warming from CMIP6 projections when weighting models by performance and independence (2020, result): “…this discussion has been sparked yet again, as several CMIP6 models show stronger warming than most of the earlier-generation CMIP5 models (Andrews et al., 2019; Gettelman et al., 2019; Golaz et al., 2019; Voldoire et al., 2019; Swart et al., 2019; Zelinka et al., 2020; Forster et al., 2020).”