CMIP6
VolMIP contributes to CMIP6 as endorsed MIP (World Climate Research Program, WCRP).
Eleven climate modeling groups have committed to perform all our core (Tier 1) experiments.
VolMIP is central to the three broad CMIP questions:
- How does the Earth system respond to external forcing?
- What are the origins and consequences of systematic model biases?
- How can we assess future climate changes given climate variability, predictability and uncertainties in scenarios?
VolMIP is closely linked to the WCRP Grand Challenge on:
- "Clouds, circulation and climate sensitivity", in particular through improved characterization of volcanic forcing and improved understanding of how the hydrological cycle and the large-scale circulation respond to volcanic forcing. VolMIP further contributes to the initiative on leveraging the past record through planned experiments describing the climate response to historical eruptions that are not (or not sufficiently) covered by CMIP6-DECK, -historical or other MIPs. VolMIP will contribute towards more reliable models through improved understanding of how model biases affect the response to a well-defined volcanic forcing.
- "Climate extremes" and "Regional climate information", in particular through a more systematical assessment of regional climate variability - and associated predictability and prediction - during periods of strong volcanic forcing at both intraseasonal-to-seasonal (e.g., post-eruption Northern Hemisphere's winter warming) and interannual-to-decadal (e.g., post-eruption delayed winter warming) time scales.
- "Water Availability", in particular through the assessment of how strong volcanic eruptions affect the monsoon systems and the occurrence of extensive and prolonged droughts.
- "CLIC and Cryosphere", in particular concerning the onset of volcanically forced long-term feedbacks involving the cryosphere which is suggested by recent studies (e.g., Miller et al., 2014, Berdahl and Robock, 2013; Zanchettin et al., 2014). VolMIP encourages the interested modeling community to discuss sensitivity experiments focused on the climatic effects of aspects related to tephra deposition.
Informations concerning VolMIP experiments (relationships with other MIPs, forcings, requirements...) could be found in the ES-DOC web page.
Application for CMIP6 endorsement
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References
Berdahl, M., and A. Robock (2013) Northern Hemispheric cryosphere response to volcanic eruptions in the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project 3 last millennium simulations, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, 12,359-12,370, doi:10.1002/2013JD019914
Miller, G. H., et al. (2012) Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L02708, doi:10.1029/2011GL050168
Zanchettin, D., et al. (2014) Inter-hemispheric asymmetry in the sea-ice response to volcanic forcing simulated by MPI-ESM (COSMOS-Mill). Earth Syst. Dynam., 5, 223-242, doi:10.5194/esd-5-223-2014
Published on 14.02.2019