International modelling collaboration

A new set of global climate model simulations were completed as part the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) .

Many international climate research centres have submitted climate simulations from their most recent global climate model to this intercomparison (IPCC, 2013). The Working Group One report of the IPCC Fifth Assessment (IPCC, 2013) made extensive use of experiments from both CMIP5 and the previous intercomparison project (called CMIP3; also described in the 2007 Climate Change in Australia projections ).

There have been several advances since CMIP3: many more global climate models participated (Technical Report Section 3.3); more models have higher resolution (Table 3.1 of  Technical Report ) and many more experiments have been performed leading to a much greater availability of different climate simulations. This allows for a greater variety of climate science questions to be studied.

Australia's contribution to the CMIP5 climate simulation archive has expanded significantly since CMIP3, mainly because of the development of the new Australian climate model ACCESS . Simulations from two versions of the ACCESS model (Technical Report Sections 3.3) as well as from the CSIRO Mk3.6 model are included in the global archive .

To read more about the difference between CMIP5 and CMIP3 with respect to global projections, see the Climate Change in Australia Technical Report Section 3.3 and 3.6. To compare the new Australian projections with the previous 2007 research, see here and Appendix A of the Technical Report .