IPCC AR4 Simulations
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First Results of the simulations and further information |
Press release of MPI-M, DKRZ and the Model and Data group (M&D) (15.02.2005):
First model simulations for the new IPCC-Report completed
The first model simulations for the fourth IPCC Report, scheduled for early 2007, have been successfully completed by scientists from Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the Group "Model and Data" at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ).
In this Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC (see also www.ipcc.ch), the actual knowledge on the state and the expected change of climate is summarised.
The simulations realised with a new climate model developed at MPI-M can be characterised as follows:
- Reconstruction of an "undisturbed" pre-industrial climate
- Climate change experiments forced with observed atmospheric greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations since the middle of the 19th century
- Scenario experiments of climate change based on different assumptions of future greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations
- CO2 sensitivity experiments (1% per year increase)
All simulations were done on the HLRE - the High Performance Computing System for Earth System Research - at DKRZ. About a quarter of the total resources were necessary in the last year to complete the simulations.
The model output is stored in a relational database and is available to German scientists for analysis. The data are available from World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and can be accessed on http://ipcc.wdc-climate.de.
First results of the simulations can be seen as figures and animations at the DKRZ: http://www.dkrz.de/dkrz/science/IPCC_AR4. They show simulated changes of the air temperature as well as the temporal development of sea ice and snow cover.
The new simulations show a mean global warming between 2.5 and 4.1 degrees Celsius until the end of this century (compared with the mean temperature between 1961-1990) - dependent on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. The seasonally varying sea ice area decreases between 30 and 50%. One of the consequences of global warming
could be a total melting of Arctic sea-ice in late summer at the end of this century.
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