For JCLI CCSM Special Issue The Community Climate System Model: CCSM3

• Main Authors: William D. Collins, Cecilia M. Bitz, Maurice L. Blackmon, Gordon B. Bonan, Christopher S. Bretherton, James A. Carton, Ping Chang, Scott C. Doney, James J. Hack, Thomas B. Henderson, Jeffrey T. Kiehl, William G. Large, Daniel S. Mckenna, Benjamin D. Santer, Richard D. Smith
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.422.2162; http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/publications/jclim04/Papers/SSC1.pdf

A new version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) has been developed and released to the climate community. CCSM3 is a coupled climate model with components representing the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land surface connected by a flux coupler. CCSM3 is designed to produce realistic simulations over a wide range of spatial resolutions, enabling inexpensive simulations lasting several millennia or detailed studies of continentalscale dynamics, variability, and climate change. This paper will show results from the configuration used for climate-change simulations with a T85 grid for the atmosphere and land and a grid with approximately 1-degree resolution for the ocean and sea-ice. The new system incorporates several significant improvements in the physical parameterizations. The enhancements in the model physics are designed to reduce or eliminate several systematic biases in the mean climate produced by previous editions of CCSM. These include