Coupled model intercomparison project
Encyclopedia
In climatology
Climatology
Climatology is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time, and is a branch of the atmospheric sciences...

, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is the analog of AMIP
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project is a standard experimental protocol for global atmospheric general circulation models . It provides a community-based infrastructure in support of climate model diagnosis, validation, intercomparison, documentation and data access...

 for global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. CMIP began in 1995 under the auspices of the Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM), which is in turn under auspices of CLIVAR
CLIVAR
CLIVAR is a component of the World Climate Research Programme. Its purpose is to describe and understand climate variability and predictability on seasonal to centennial time-scales, identify the physical processes responsible for climate change and develop modeling and predictive capabilities for...

 and the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Program. The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...

 supports CMIP by helping WGCM to determine the scope of the project, by maintaining the project's data base, and by participating in data analysis. CMIP has received model output from the pre-industrial climate simulations ("control runs") and 1% per year increasing-CO2 simulations of about 30 coupled GCMs. More recent phases of the project (20C3M, ...) include more realistic scenarios of climate forcing.

The current phase of the project (as of 2010) is CMIP5.

CMIP5 will include more metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 describing model simulations than previous phases. The METAFOR
METAFOR
The Common Metadata for Climate Modelling Digital Repositories, or METAFOR project, is creating a Common Information Model for climate data and the models that produce it....

 project has created an exhaustive schema
Schema
The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" , which means shape, or more generally, plan. The plural is "σχήματα"...

describing the scientific, technical, and numerical aspects of CMIP runs and this information will be
archived along with the output data.

External links

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