–Contributed by Richard Essery
A meeting to discuss ESM-SnowMIP was held on April 11 during EGU 2019, with 20 people in attendance. Richard Essery, Gerhard Krinner and Hyungjun Kim presented progress and plans.
Simulations for 10 reference sites have been submitted by 27 models and 2 ensembles driven with in situ data, and 22 models driven by bias-corrected global data.
An overview paper has been published (https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/5027/2018/). A paper documenting the reference site driving and evaluation data is in review (https://www.earth-syst-sci-data-discuss.net/essd-2019-12/), and the data are freely available from https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.897575. Work is now in progress to interpret the results for non-forested sites led by Cécile Ménard, for forested sites led by Paul Bartlett, and for large-scale forcing at reference sites led by Richard Essery.
Global coupled simulations for CMIP6 and global uncoupled simulations for LS3MIP are now underway in major modelling centres. Because of the high demands of these simulations, the requests for additional constrained ESM-SnowMIP simulations will be delayed until they are complete. It has been decided that the SnowMIP-rmLC prescribed snow experiment should be performed in coupled land-atmosphere configurations to avoid extreme hydrological impacts on circulation in coupled land-atmosphere-ocean models.
Additional site simulations can be performed at much lower cost by a wider range of models. A decision will be made whether to prioritise constrained simulations (prescribed constant snow albedo, prescribed neutral exchange coefficient, no soil insulation) or additional reference sites (to include more challenging ice sheet, tundra and prairie locations) in the next round of experiments.
The GSWP3 global driving data being used in LS3MIP can be obtained from http://www.dias.nii.ac.jp/gswp3/input.html with user name gswp3 and password pilotdata2014. These data have not yet been publically released; please contact Hyungjun Kim (hjkim@iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp) to discuss any use.