Transient simulations for present and last interglacials using a comprehensive coupled climate model CCSM3 (Community Climate System Model 3.0), links to model result files in NetCDF format, supplement to: Varma, Vidya; Prange, Matthias; Schulz, Michael (2016): Transient simulations of the present and the last interglacial climate using the Community Climate System Model version 3: effects of orbital acceleration. Geoscientific Model Development, 9(11), 3859-3873

• Main Authors: Varma, Vidya, Prange, Matthias, Schulz, Michael
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA - Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science 2016
• Subjects: File name; File format; File size; Uniform resource locator/link to file; Center for Marine Environmental Sciences MARUM; Climate Change Learning from the past climate Past4Future; Southern Ocean; Nordic Seas
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.867327; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.867327

Transient simulations are widely used in studying the past climate as they provide better comparison with any exisiting proxy data. However, multi-millennial transient simulations using coupled climate models are usually computationally very expensive. As a result several acceleration techniques are implemented when using numerical simulations to recreate past climate. In this study, we compare the results from transient simulations of the present and the last interglacial with and without acceleration of the orbital forcing, using the comprehensive coupled climate model CCSM3 (Community Climate System Model 3). Our study shows that in low-latitude regions, the simulation of long-term variations in interglacial surface climate is not significantly affected by the use of the acceleration technique (with an acceleration factor of 10) and hence, large-scale model-data comparison of surface variables is not hampered. However, in high-latitude regions where the surface climate has a direct connection to the deep ocean, e.g. in the Southern Ocean or the Nordic Seas, acceleration-induced biases in sea-surface temperature evolution may occur with potential influence on the dynamics of the overlying atmosphere. The data provided here are from both accelerated and non-accelerated runs as decadal mean values.