CCSM3.0 Notable Improvements

Atmosphere:

  1. New treatments of cloud and ice-phase processes;
  2. Improved representation of the interactions among water vapor, solar radiation, and terrestrial thermal radiation;
  3. New treatment of the effects of aerosols, including prognostic sulfate, on the reflection and absorption of solar radiation; and
  4. New dynamical frameworks suitable for modeling atmospheric chemistry.

Coupler:

  1. Improved performance and scalability on parallel supercomputers;
  2. Faster multi-way communication among the component models; and
  3. New communications infrastructure.

Land:

  1. New methods to enable simulation of the terrestrial carbon cycle;
  2. New methods to enable simulation of dynamic vegetation; and
  3. Improvements in land-surface physics to reduce temperature biases; and
  4. New load balancing implementation results in substantial performance improvement.

Ocean:

  1. Improvements to the representation of the ocean mixed layer;
  2. Inclusion of solar heating by chlorophyll; and
  3. New infrastructure for studying vertical mixing in the ocean.

Sea-ice:

  1. New advanced sea ice rheology;
  2. Explicit ice-thickness distribution physics;
  3. Explicit treatment of brine pockets; and
  4. Improved scheme for horizontal advection of sea ice.

Complete System:

  1. New portability for vector and Linux supercomputers;
  2. New, easy-to-use methods to run IPCC climate-change experiments;
  3. Flexibility to simulate climate over a wide range of spatial resolutions with greater fidelity; and
  4. New built-in test facilities suitable for validating installation and verifying some types of model changes.

CESM Project

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.

CESM is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Administration of the CESM is maintained by the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).