The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) is a program at the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

Livermore, California Livermore (formerly Livermorès, Livermore Ranch, and Nottingham) is a city in Alameda County, California. With a 2020 population of 87,955, Livermore is the most populous city in the Tri-Valley. It is located on the eastern edge of Californ ...

. Livermore is in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. It is funded by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Group (RGCM) and the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) programs of the Climate and Environment Sciences Division of the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

Main activities

The main goal of PCMDI is to develop improved methods and tools for the diagnosis and intercomparison of

general circulation model A general circulation model (GCM) is a type of climate model. It employs a mathematical model of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean. It uses the Navier–Stokes equations on a rotating sphere with thermodynamic terms f ...

s (GCMs). PCMDI is the canonical resource for a number of model intercomparison projects, including the

Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) is a standard experimental protocol for global atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). It provides a community-based infrastructure in support of climate model diagnosis, validation, intercomp ...

(AMIP),

Coupled Model Intercomparison Project In climatology, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a collaborative framework designed to improve knowledge of climate change. It was organized in 1995 by the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) of the World Climate Researc ...

(CMIP), Seasonal Prediction Model Intercomparison Project (SMIP), Aqua-Planet Experimental Project (APE), and Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP). PCMDI is also developing the Cloud-Associated Parameterizations Testbed (CAPT) and is involved with other research and innovations that will help with the diagnosis, tweaking, and intercomparison of models.

Reception

The model intercomparisons run by PCMDI are used in the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) a ...

(IPCC) reports, such as in Chapter 8 of the Working Group I report for the

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report ''Climate Change 2007'', the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2007 and is the fourth in a series of reports intended to assess scientific, technical and socio ...

. On April 6, 2009, the

American Meteorological Society The American Meteorological Society (AMS) is the premier scientific and professional organization in the United States promoting and disseminating information about the atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic sciences. Its mission is to advance t ...

held a meeting in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which ...

to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the operation of the PCMDI. The meeting summary was published in the '' Journal of the American Meteorological Society'' in May 2011.

References

External links

*{{Official website, www-pcmdi.llnl.gov Climate modeling