RCEMIP: Radiative-Convective Equilbrium Model Intercomparison Project
RCEMIP-II
We are excited to move towards a Phase II of RCEMIP, which will involve simulations with a prescribed analytic SST boundary condition. For more info check out: RCEMIP Simulations and the RCEMIP-II protocol paper. Registration for participating in Phase II is now open!
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About RCEMIP
Radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE) is an idealization of the tropical atmosphere, in which there is a statistical balance between radiative cooling and convective heating. RCE has long been used to study basic questions in climate science, from the vertical temperature structure of the tropics and the first estimates of climate sensitivity, to the scaling of the hydrological cycle with warming, interactions between convection and radiation, and the organization of convection.
RCEMIP is a coordinated intercomparison of models configured in RCE, to include both cloud resolving models (CRMs) and general circulation models (GCMs). There are a large variety of scientific questions that could be explored with RCEMIP, but we focus on changes in clouds and convective activity with warming, cloud feedbacks and climate sensitivity, and the aggregation of convection and its role in climate. These topics are related to some of the biggest open questions in climate dynamics, as detailed by the WCRP Grand Challenge on Clouds, Circulation, and Climate Sensitivity (Bony et al., 2015). In addition to addressing these important questions, RCEMIP serves as a common baseline, enabling assessment of the formulaic sensitivity of simulations of RCE and providing a fixed point for past and future studies.
The following documents provide more information on RCEMIP and describe the simulation protocol:
Paper describing RCEMIP-II Protocol, in review at Geoscientific Model Development:
Wing, A.A., L.G. Silvers, and K.A. Reed: RCEMIP-II: Mock-Walker Simulations as Phase II of the Radiative-Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss. [preprint], doi:10.5194/gmd-2023-235, in review.
Wing, A. A., Reed, K. A., Satoh, M., Stevens, B., Bony, S., and Ohno, T. (2018): Radiative-Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 793-813, doi:10.5194/gmd-11-793-2018.
***Some clarification on the output specification can be found here (Updated October 2, 2018).
***A correction to the definition of frozen moist static energy can be found here.
Paper providing an overview of the RCEMIP-I simulations, published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems:
Wing, A.A., C.L. Stauffer, T. Becker, K.A. Reed, M.-S. Ahn, N.P. Arnold, S. Bony, M. Branson, G.H. Bryan, J.-P. Chaboureau, S.R. de Roode, K. Gayatri, C. Hohenegger, I.-K. Hu, F. Jansson, T.R. Jones, M. Khairoutdionv, D. Kim, Z.K. Martin, S. Matsugishi, B. Medeiros, H. Miura, Y. Moon, S.K. Müller, T. Ohno, M. Popp, T. Prabhakaran, D. Randall, R. Rios-Berrios, N. Rochetin, R. Roehrig, D.M. Romps, J.H. Ruppert, Jr., M. Satoh, L.G. Silvers, M.S. Singh, B. Stevens, L. Tomassini, C.C. van Heerwaarden, S. Wang, and M. Zhao (2020): Clouds and convective self-aggregation in a multi-model ensemble of radiative-convective equilibrium simulations, J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 12, e2020MS002138, doi:10.1029/2020MS002138.
RCEMIP Scientific Objectives, including links to relevant presentations and papers
RCEMIP Simulations: experimental design, diagnostic code, data access
Data Access and Usage Guidelines
The standardized RCEMIP output is hosted by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and is publicly available at http://hdl.handle.net/21.14101/d4beee8e-6996-453e-bbd1-ff53b6874c0e. In addition to the raw data, several post-processed domain- and time-average statistics are available in the A-Statistics folder as .csv files. Please let us know that you are using the RCEMIP data by filling out the below form. We recommend reviewing the list of known bugs and inconsistencies with the RCEMIP protocol, which can be found here. If you use RCEMIP data in a publication, we ask that you cite the RCEMIP protocol paper (Wing et al. 2018), the RCEMIP overview paper (Wing et al. 2020), and including the following acknowledgement statement:
We thank the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) for hosting the standardized RCEMIP data, which is publicly available at http://hdl.handle.net/21.14101/d4beee8e-6996-453e-bbd1-ff53b6874c0e.
AGU Special Collection:
Using radiative-convective equilibrium to understand convective organization, clouds, and tropical climate
RCEMIP Organizers:
Allison A. Wing (Florida State University), Kevin A. Reed (Stony Brook University), Masaki Satoh (University of Tokyo), Bjorn Stevens (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology), Sandrine Bony (LMD/IPSL/CNRS), Tomoki Ohno (JAMSTEC)
Questions? Email awing at fsu.edu