Cryosphere, by Christian Klepp

Models

Numerical models are important tools for climate research. Models used at the MPI-M cover the atmosphere, ocean and land, and include physical, chemical as well as biogeochemical processes. Models are developed for global and for regional applications. Coupling models of climate components to more comprehensive models, up to the Earth system model, is a major goal of the current development at the institute. In it‘s most recent form this is the Max-Planck-Institute-Earth-System-Model MPI-ESM.


All MPI-M models are subject to licences, which can be found on the left. They need to be accepted by the users of the models when acquiring them as described below, or via a web form before downloading them.
To encourage interaction amongst developers and users for MPI-ESM a forum is set up as well as an email-list to distribute news about changes like bug fixes or the planning and release of new versions. Users of MPI-ESM need to be members of this forum, and need to accept the licence to become members. This will be the method of choice also for other new models of MPI-M as they will become available.


Model distribution:

  • MPI-ESM, as it has been used for the German CMIP5-experiments, containing ECHAM6 and the most current version of MPI-OM as well as many other new features is available here.
  • ECHAM5 as standalone model and the COSMOS framework are available for research and education under the MPI-M Software License Agreement. The COSMOS framework is a software package that includes model codes, specifically the codes of the ECHAM5 and MPIOM general circulation models and the OASIS coupler, and scripting environments that allow to extract and run specific model versions from a single software package. The COSMOS Framework allows for example to build the ECHAM5/MPIOM climate model, including an active carbon cycle.The software package is distributed by sending an email to the contact person for the COSMOS-model, see here.
  • The MPI-M special section in J. Climate Vol.19 No.16 comprises a series of papers describing and evaluating the atmospheric ECHAM5 GCM in different configurations and the coupled atmosphere ocean model ECHAM5/MPI-OM, which has been used for the German IPCC-AR4 simulations.