Earth System Models of high computational efficiency

01/20/2011 - Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity have been at the center of a workshop in Potsdam this week. Participants from ten countries discussed the future of these models and their contribution to the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In contrast to state of the art Earth System Models, those with intermediate complexity show high computational efficiency, or relatively low cost. “For this reason we can perfom with these models more and longer future projections”, Andrey Ganopolski from the Potsdam Institut für Climate Impact Research (PIK) says.
Earth System Models of high computational efficiency

This important advantage of EMICs - Earth System models of Intermediate Complexity - was demonstrated by Heiko Goelzer from the University of Brussels who performed a comprehensive uncertainties analysis in long-term climate and sea level change projections. This type of studies is still to expensive for those models with high complexity. Viktor Brovkin of the Max-Planck-Institute in Hamburg and Eva Bauer of the PIK presented pioneering results on simulations of the last glacial cycle with the Climate-Biosphere Model CLIMBER, developed at PIK. Their results shed light on the mechanism of past climate and carbon dioxide changes. The presentations at the workshop altogether revealed a very broad range of EMIC applications.

The workshop has been jointly organised by the PIK in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement in Gif-sur-Yvette