The Model Intercomparison Project on the Climatic Response to Volcanic Forcing (VolMIP): Status and Future Perspectives of the Initiative
- 1Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Dip. di Scienze Ambientali, Informatica e Statistica, Mestre, Italy
- 2Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Bundesstr. 53, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
- 3Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat: Expérimentations et Approches Numériques, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, Sorbonne Université, IRD/CNRS/MNHN, Paris, France
- 4Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
- 5Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
- 6Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Quebec in Montreal, Montreal, Canada
- 7Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
- 8Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IPA), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
- 9Meteorological Institute, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany
- 10Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
The Model Intercomparison Project on the climatic response to Volcanic forcing (VolMIP) is a protocol-driven international initiative under the umbrella of the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) aiming at coordinating the activities of different Research Institutes involved in numerical climate modelling focused on a multi-model assessment of climate models' performance under strong volcanic forcing conditions. The main objective of the initiative is to assess to what extent responses of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system to the same applied strong volcanic forcing are robustly simulated across state-of-the-art coupled climate models and identify the causes that limit robust simulated behavior, especially differences in their treatment of physical processes. To this purpose, four Tier-1 (mandatory) experiments branched into two main sets, named “volc-pinatubo” and “volc-long” were defined, together with eight more lower-priority experiments. Six years since the definition of the VolMIP protocol (Zanchettin et al., 2016), ensemble simulations of most of the mandatory VolMIP experiments have been completed and made publicly available through the Earth System Grid Federation open platform, with the first VolMIP results being currently published and several analyses in progress. The long turnover time between the experiment design, the integration of the simulations and the analysis of the output motivates an assessment of the overall effectiveness of the VolMIP strategy, particularly in the light of a possible second phase of the initiative.
In this contribution, we will illustrate the status of the initiative, highlight its major achievements and discuss its future perspective in the light of emergent scientific questions regarding volcanically forced climate variability.
Zanchettin, D., Khodri, M., Timmreck, C., Toohey, M., Schmidt, A., Gerber, E. P., Hegerl, G., Robock, A., Pausata, F. S. R., Ball, W. T., Bauer, S. E., Bekki, S., Dhomse, S. S., LeGrande, A. N., Mann, G. W., Marshall, L., Mills, M., Marchand, M., Niemeier, U., Poulain, V., Rozanov, E., Rubino, A., Stenke, A., Tsigaridis, K., and Tummon, F.: The Model Intercomparison Project on the climatic response to Volcanic forcing (VolMIP): experimental design and forcing input data for CMIP6, Geosci. Model Dev., 9, 2701–2719, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-2701-2016, 2016
How to cite: Zanchettin, D., Timmreck, C., Khodri, M., Hegerl, G., Krüger, K., Pausata, F. S. R., Robock, A., Schmidt, A., and Toohey, M.: The Model Intercomparison Project on the Climatic Response to Volcanic Forcing (VolMIP): Status and Future Perspectives of the Initiative, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-2604, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2604, 2023.
