Earth's climate is undergoing rapid change, with anthropogenically forced trends emerging across the atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere. At the same time, internally generated multidecadal variability continues to modulate regional and global climate evolution, complicating attribution and prediction. Therefore, understanding the interplay between externally forced change and natural variability is essential for improving confidence in climate projections, decadal predictions, and climate risk assessments.

Recognizing the importance of addressing these issues, the WCRP CLIVAR has initiated a research focus on “Confronting Earth System Model Trends and Multidecadal Variability with Observations (CEMT-MV)”. This session contributes to CEMT-MV, offering a venue to summarize recent work and to stimulate new research. We invite contributions on the detection and attribution of observed climate trends, separation of externally forced signals and internal climate variability, and multidecadal variability in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and coupled climate system. We are particularly interested in the evaluation of existing and new ESM simulations (e.g., CMIP7 and PMIP7) and reanalysis datasets, on the mechanisms underlying simulated and observed multidecadal variability, and on implications for decadal climate prediction. We welcome studies utilizing paleo-climate reconstructions and data-model comparisons for the last millenium and ones that introduce new methods, including AI and machine learning, for identifying trends and multidecadal variability. Implications for future climate projections, regional climate change, and climate services.