Precipitation Driver and Response
Model Intercomparison Project
(PDRMIP)
Introduction
PDRMIP is an international effort to compare the changes in precipitation predicted by global climate
models. The project is led by CICERO and the participants of the present application, and supported
by the Research Council of Norway through the NORKLIMA project NAPEX.
This application requests allocation of central storage for the output from all climate models
participating in PDRMIP, and for assistance in making the data freely available to other groups
through the already existing Norwegian Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) node.
The participants are experienced users of HPC in general, and abel in particular, and have previously
utilized NOTUR resources e.g. through grants nr nn9188k and nn4701k.
This NORSTORE application for storage and data availability is accompanied by a related NOTUR
application for computing resources on abel.
Project description
Background
Precipitation is arguably the most direct link between the climate and human society. We depend
upon existing precipitation patterns for fresh water and food production, and global infrastructure is
designed to withstand current precipitation extremes. The future scenarios of precipitation changes
from global climate models do not agree very well on global nor regional scale.
However, recent studies have shown that precipitation changes from particular drivers of climate
change (such as greenhouse gases and various aerosol types) have evident similarities. A main
hypothesis of the PDRMIP project is that differences in anthropogenic and natural drivers of climate
change, both with regard to distribution and strength, is a crucial factor in the differences in the
precipitation response in current global climate models.
In PDRMIP, 5-10 major climate models will perform unified experiments, using common scenarios
and a standardized output. This output will be made freely available to the scientific community, to
encourage participation from other international modelling groups. PDRMIP is funded by the
Research Council of Norway, through the project NAPEX.
Data to be stored
For the first phase of PDRMIP, twelve climate scenarios have been agreed on. For each of these, two
model configurations are needed – one that only investigates the atmospheric response while
keeping sea temperatures unchanged (fixed-SST runs), and one that allows the ocean to respond
dynamically to atmospheric changes (fully coupled runs).
The scenarios include changes in greenhouse gases (CO2 and methane), changes in solar insolation,
and a series of changes to aerosol concentrations. The fixed-SST runs need only 15 years of model
simulations per scenario, while the fully coupled runs require the aggregation of 100 years each to be
able to average out natural variability and also to study changes in extreme precipitation.
Data availability
Expected project deliverables
The goal of PDRMIP is to contribute to the understanding of future climate change at the forefront of
international research. The participating groups each run and/or maintain a state-of-the-art climate
model, and are heavily involved in other ongoing model intercomparison projects such as CMIP and
GeoMIP.
PDRMIP will publish a series of papers in international journals, building on existing work from all
groups. In addition, the NAPEX project plans science outreach activities in Norway, through blogs,
newspaper articles and opinion pieces, that will be based on the results from PDRMIP.
Current internal project members
Name
Position
Gunnar Myhre
Senior research fellow (CICERO)
Bjørn H. Samset
Senior research fellow (CICERO)
Øivind Hodnebrog
Senior research fellow (CICERO)
Jana Sillmann
Senior research fellow (CICERO)/
Researcher (UiO)