The formulation and simulation characteristics of two new global coupled climate models developed at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) are described. The models were designed to simulate atmospheric and oceanic climate and variability from the diurnal time scale through multicentury climate change, given our computational constraints. In particular, an important goal was to use the same model for both experimental seasonal to interannual forecasting and the study of multicentury global climate change, and this goal has been achieved. Two versions of the coupled model are described, called CM2.0 and CM2.1. The versions differ primarily in the dynamical core used in the atmospheric component, along with the cloud tuning and some details of the land and ocean components. For both coupled models, the resolution of the land and atmospheric components is 2° latitude × 2.5° longitude; the atmospheric model has 24 vertical levels. The ocean resolution is 1° in latitude and longitude, with meridional resolution equatorward of 30° becoming progressively finer, such that the meridional resolution is 1/3° at the equator. There are 50 vertical levels in the ocean, with 22 evenly spaced levels within the top 220 m. The ocean component has poles over North America and Eurasia to avoid polar filtering. Neither coupled model employs flux adjustments. The control simulations have stable, realistic climates when integrated over multiple centuries. Both models have simulations of ENSO that are substantially improved relative to previous GFDL coupled models. The CM2.0 model has been further evaluated as an ENSO forecast model and has good skill (CM2.1 has not been evaluated as an ENSO forecast model). Generally reduced temperature and salinity biases exist in CM2.1 relative to CM2.0. These reductions are associated with 1) improved simulations of surface wind stress in CM2.1 and associated changes in oceanic gyre circulations; 2) changes in cloud tuning and the land model, both of which act to increase the net surface shortwave radiation in CM2.1, thereby reducing an overall cold bias present in CM2.0; and 3) a reduction of ocean lateral viscosity in the extratropics in CM2.1, which reduces sea ice biases in the North Atlantic. Both models have been used to conduct a suite of climate change simulations for the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report and are able to simulate the main features of the observed warming of the twentieth century. The climate sensitivities of the CM2.0 and CM2.1 models are 2.9 and 3.4 K, respectively. These sensitivities are defined by coupling the atmospheric components of CM2.0 and CM2.1 to a slab ocean model and allowing the model to come into equilibrium with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. The output from a suite of integrations conducted with these models is freely available online (see http://nomads.gfdl.noaa.gov/).

We describe the baseline coupled model configuration and simulation characteristics of GFDL's Earth System Model Version 4.1 (ESM4.1), which builds on component and coupled model developments at GFDL over 2013–2018 for coupled carbon‐chemistry‐climate simulation contributing to the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. In contrast with GFDL's CM4.0 development effort that focuses on ocean resolution for physical climate, ESM4.1 focuses on comprehensiveness of Earth system interactions. ESM4.1 features doubled horizontal resolution of both atmosphere (2° to 1°) and ocean (1° to 0.5°) relative to GFDL's previous‐generation coupled ESM2‐carbon and CM3‐chemistry models. ESM4.1 brings together key representational advances in CM4.0 dynamics and physics along with those in aerosols and their precursor emissions, land ecosystem vegetation and canopy competition, and multiday fire; ocean ecological and biogeochemical interactions, comprehensive land‐atmosphere‐ocean cycling of CO₂, dust and iron, and interactive ocean‐atmosphere nitrogen cycling are described in detail across this volume of JAMES and presented here in terms of the overall coupling and resulting fidelity. ESM4.1 provides much improved fidelity in CO₂ and chemistry over ESM2 and CM3, captures most of CM4.0's baseline simulations characteristics, and notably improves on CM4.0 in (1) Southern Ocean mode and intermediate water ventilation, (2) Southern Ocean aerosols, and (3) reduced spurious ocean heat uptake. ESM4.1 has reduced transient and equilibrium climate sensitivity compared to CM4.0. Fidelity concerns include (1) moderate degradation in sea surface temperature biases, (2) degradation in aerosols in some regions, and (3) strong centennial scale climate modulation by Southern Ocean convection.

This study presents the results of a broad intercomparison of a total of 15 global aerosol models within the AeroCom project. Each model is compared to observations related to desert dust aerosols, their direct radiative effect, and their impact on the biogeochemical cycle, i.e., aerosol optical depth (AOD) and dust deposition. Additional comparisons to Angström exponent (AE), coarse mode AOD and dust surface concentrations are included to extend the assessment of model performance and to identify common biases present in models. These data comprise a benchmark dataset that is proposed for model inspection and future dust model development. There are large differences among the global models that simulate the dust cycle and its impact on climate. In general, models simulate the climatology of vertically integrated parameters (AOD and AE) within a factor of two whereas the total deposition and surface concentration are reproduced within a factor of 10. In addition, smaller mean normalized bias and root mean square errors are obtained for the climatology of AOD and AE than for total deposition and surface concentration. Characteristics of the datasets used and their uncertainties may influence these differences. Large uncertainties still exist with respect to the deposition fluxes in the southern oceans. Further measurements and model studies are necessary to assess the general model performance to reproduce dust deposition in ocean regions sensible to iron contributions. Models overestimate the wet deposition in regions dominated by dry deposition. They generally simulate more realistic surface concentration at stations downwind of the main sources than at remote ones. Most models simulate the gradient in AOD and AE between the different dusty regions. However the seasonality and magnitude of both variables is better simulated at African stations than Middle East ones. The models simulate the offshore transport of West Africa throughout the year but they overestimate the AOD and they transport too fine particles. The models also reproduce the dust transport across the Atlantic in the summer in terms of both AOD and AE but not so well in winter-spring nor the southward displacement of the dust cloud that is responsible of the dust transport into South America. Based on the dependency of AOD on aerosol burden and size distribution we use model bias with respect to AOD and AE to infer the bias of the dust emissions in Africa and the Middle East. According to this analysis we suggest that a range of possible emissions for North Africa is 400 to 2200 Tg yr⁻¹ and in the Middle East 26 to 526 Tg yr⁻¹.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) has developed a coupled general circulation model (CM3) for the atmosphere, oceans, land, and sea ice. The goal of CM3 is to address emerging issues in climate change, including aerosol–cloud interactions, chemistry–climate interactions, and coupling between the troposphere and stratosphere. The model is also designed to serve as the physical system component of earth system models and models for decadal prediction in the near-term future—for example, through improved simulations in tropical land precipitation relative to earlier-generation GFDL models. This paper describes the dynamical core, physical parameterizations, and basic simulation characteristics of the atmospheric component (AM3) of this model. Relative to GFDL AM2, AM3 includes new treatments of deep and shallow cumulus convection, cloud droplet activation by aerosols, subgrid variability of stratiform vertical velocities for droplet activation, and atmospheric chemistry driven by emissions with advective, convective, and turbulent transport. AM3 employs a cubed-sphere implementation of a finite-volume dynamical core and is coupled to LM3, a new land model with ecosystem dynamics and hydrology. Its horizontal resolution is approximately 200 km, and its vertical resolution ranges approximately from 70 m near the earth’s surface to 1 to 1.5 km near the tropopause and 3 to 4 km in much of the stratosphere. Most basic circulation features in AM3 are simulated as realistically, or more so, as in AM2. In particular, dry biases have been reduced over South America. In coupled mode, the simulation of Arctic sea ice concentration has improved. AM3 aerosol optical depths, scattering properties, and surface clear-sky downward shortwave radiation are more realistic than in AM2. The simulation of marine stratocumulus decks remains problematic, as in AM2. The most intense 0.2% of precipitation rates occur less frequently in AM3 than observed. The last two decades of the twentieth century warm in CM3 by 0.32°C relative to 1881–1920. The Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyses of observations show warming of 0.56° and 0.52°C, respectively, over this period. CM3 includes anthropogenic cooling by aerosol–cloud interactions, and its warming by the late twentieth century is somewhat less realistic than in CM2.1, which warmed 0.66°C but did not include aerosol–cloud interactions. The improved simulation of the direct aerosol effect (apparent in surface clear-sky downward radiation) in CM3 evidently acts in concert with its simulation of cloud–aerosol interactions to limit greenhouse gas warming.

We use 23 atmospheric chemistry transport models to calculate current and future (2030) deposition of reactive nitrogen (NO_y, NH_x) and sulfate (SO_x) to land and ocean surfaces. The models are driven by three emission scenarios: (1) current air quality legislation (CLE); (2) an optimistic case of the maximum emissions reductions currently technologically feasible (MFR); and (3) the contrasting pessimistic IPCC SRES A2 scenario. An extensive evaluation of the present‐day deposition using nearly all information on wet deposition available worldwide shows a good agreement with observations in Europe and North America, where 60–70% of the model‐calculated wet deposition rates agree to within ±50% with quality‐controlled measurements. Models systematically overestimate NH_x deposition in South Asia, and underestimate NO_y deposition in East Asia. We show that there are substantial differences among models for the removal mechanisms of NO_y, NH_x, and SO_x, leading to ±1 σ variance in total deposition fluxes of about 30% in the anthropogenic emissions regions, and up to a factor of 2 outside. In all cases the mean model constructed from the ensemble calculations is among the best when comparing to measurements. Currently, 36–51% of all NO_y, NH_x, and SO_x is deposited over the ocean, and 50–80% of the fraction of deposition on land falls on natural (nonagricultural) vegetation. Currently, 11% of the world's natural vegetation receives nitrogen deposition in excess of the “critical load” threshold of 1000 mg(N) m⁻² yr⁻¹. The regions most affected are the United States (20% of vegetation), western Europe (30%), eastern Europe (80%), South Asia (60%), East Asia (40%), southeast Asia (30%), and Japan (50%). Future deposition fluxes are mainly driven by changes in emissions, and less importantly by changes in atmospheric chemistry and climate. The global fraction of vegetation exposed to nitrogen loads in excess of 1000 mg(N) m⁻² yr⁻¹ increases globally to 17% for CLE and 25% for A2. In MFR, the reductions in NO_y are offset by further increases for NH_x deposition. The regions most affected by exceedingly high nitrogen loads for CLE and A2 are Europe and Asia, but also parts of Africa.

We have developed a global three‐dimensional chemical transport model called Model of Ozone and Related Chemical Tracers (MOZART), version 2. This model, which will be made available to the community, is built on the framework of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Model of Atmospheric Transport and Chemistry (MATCH) and can easily be driven with various meteorological inputs and model resolutions. In this work, we describe the standard configuration of the model, in which the model is driven by meteorological inputs every 3 hours from the middle atmosphere version of the NCAR Community Climate Model (MACCM3) and uses a 20‐min time step and a horizontal resolution of 2.8° latitude × 2.8° longitude with 34 vertical levels extending up to approximately 40 km. The model includes a detailed chemistry scheme for tropospheric ozone, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbon chemistry, with 63 chemical species. Tracer advection is performed using a flux‐form semi‐Lagrangian scheme with a pressure fixer. Subgrid‐scale convective and boundary layer parameterizations are included in the model. Surface emissions include sources from fossil fuel combustion, biofuel and biomass burning, biogenic and soil emissions, and oceanic emissions. Parameterizations of dry and wet deposition are included. Stratospheric concentrations of several long‐lived species (including ozone) are constrained by relaxation toward climatological values. The distribution of tropospheric ozone is well simulated in the model, including seasonality and horizontal and vertical gradients. However, the model tends to overestimate ozone near the tropopause at high northern latitudes. Concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and nitric acid (HNO₃) agree well with observed values, but peroxyacetylnitrate (PAN) is overestimated by the model in the upper troposphere at several locations. Carbon monoxide (CO) is simulated well at most locations, but the seasonal cycle is underestimated at some sites in the Northern Hemisphere. We find that in situ photochemical production and loss dominate the tropospheric ozone budget, over input from the stratosphere and dry deposition. Approximately 75% of the tropospheric production and loss of ozone occurs within the tropics, with large net production in the tropical upper troposphere. Tropospheric production and loss of ozone are three to four times greater in the northern extratropics than the southern extratropics. The global sources of CO consist of photochemical production (55%) and direct emissions (45%). The tropics dominate the chemistry of CO, accounting for about 75% of the tropospheric production and loss. The global budgets of tropospheric ozone and CO are generally consistent with the range found in recent studies. The lifetime of methane (9.5 years) and methylchloroform (5.7 years) versus oxidation by tropospheric hydroxyl radical (OH), two useful measures of the global abundance of OH, agree well with recent estimates. Concentrations of nonmethane hydrocarbons and oxygenated intermediates (carbonyls and peroxides) generally agree well with observations.