Climate extremes at various global warming levels

The Optimal High-Resolution Earth System Models for Exploring Future Climate Changes (OptimESM) project aims at developing the next generation of ESMs, bringing together increased model  resolution and process realism. Project partners committed to provide a set of idealised simulations with state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs) that go beyond CMIP6 experiments. In particular, there are new ESM simulations with zero CO2 emissions to represent different global warming levels (GWLs), including previous temperature overshoots. These new simulations take into account the committed warming from a gradually warming climate and thereby differ from the widely used time slots around a point in time when a transient climate simulation passes a given future warming level.

First results from these idealised simulations with EC-Earth3-ESM, a post-CMIP6 configuration of the EC-Earth model family will be presented. We analyse and compare the strength and duration of climate extremes at different GWLs with CLIMIX tools, including a comparison against a pre-industrial control  and a historical climate simulation.