The Australian Earth System Model: ACCESS-ESM1.5

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2020 papers

Abstract

The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) has been extended to include land and ocean carbon cycle components to form an Earth System Model (ESM). The current version, ACCESS-ESM1.5, has been mainly developed to enable Australia to participate in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with an ESM version. Here we describe the model components and changes to the previous version, ACCESS-ESM1. We use the 500-year pre-industrial control run to highlight the stability of the physical climate and the carbon cycle. The long spin-up, negligible drift in temperature and small pre-industrial net carbon fluxes (0.02 and 0.08 PgC year−1 for land and ocean respectively) highlight the suitability of ACCESS-ESM1.5 to explore modes of variability in the climate system and coupling to the carbon cycle. The physical climate and carbon cycle for the present day have been evaluated using the CMIP6 historical simulation by comparing against observations and ACCESS-ESM1. Although there is generally little change in the climate simulation from the earlier model, many aspects of the carbon simulation are improved. An assessment of the climate response to CO2 forcing indicates that ACCESS-ESM1.5 has an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3.87°C.

Related Papers

• → Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project Phase 2: Synthesizing Earth System Knowledge for Probabilistic Climate Projections(2021)122 cited
• → On the increased climate sensitivity in the EC-Earth model from CMIP5 to CMIP6(2019)38 cited
• → Development of earth/climate system models in China: A review from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project perspective(2014)45 cited
• → Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project Phase 2: Synthesising Earth system knowledge for probabilistic climate projections(2020)7 cited
• → Uncertainty-informed selection of CMIP6 Earth System Model subsets for use in multisectoral and impact models(2024)3 cited