The Earth system model CLIMBER-X v1.0 – Part 1: Climate model description and validation

The climate component of CLIMBER-X consists of a 2.5-D semi-empirical statistical- dynamical atmosphere model, a 3-D frictional-geostrophic ocean model, a dynamic-thermodynamic sea ice model and a land surface model. All the model components are discretized on a regular lat-long grid with a horizontal resolution of 5 degrees x 5 degrees.

The model has a throughput of similar to 10 000 simulation years per day on a single node with 16 CPUs on a high-performance computer and is designed to simulate the evolution of the Earth system on temporal scales ranging from decades to > 100 000 years. A comprehensive evaluation of the model performance for the present day and the historical period shows that CLIMBER-X is capable of realistically reproducing many observed climate characteristics, with results that generally lie within the range of state-of-the-art general circulation models.