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ModelE Climate Simulations

Earth's Energy Imbalance

These webpages present data products related to the journal article "Earth's energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications" by Hansen et al. (2005).

The climate model runs underlying these studies are based on a control run with year 1880 forcings (run ID E3AoM20A).

An ensemble of five simulations with identical time-varying forcing (see "Forcings in GISS Climate Model" pages) ran for the period 1880-2003, with the identifying model run numbers being E3Af8?oM20A, where ?=a,f,g,h,i corresponds to the five ensemble members with initial state taken from the control run (E3AoM20A) at the beginning of model years 6, 31, 56, 81 and 106, respectively. Monthly time series of key model diagnostics were averaged over the 5 runs and are available via the displays below.

The diagnostics from the corresponding, partially overlapping 5 monthly series of the control run were averaged to obtain mean control run diagnostics that are available to allow subtraction of the small drift in the control run.

The model runs accessed by clicking the icons below are the original runs submitted in 2004 for inclusion in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report; these are also the runs used to construct the figures in the paper "Earth's energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications". These runs, including many additional diagnostics, are also available from the IPCC Model Output website.

Model results from additional climate simulations are available from the Transient Simulations website; it presents various scenarios for extending the climate forcing to 2100 as well as simulations in which the stratospheric ozone change during the period 1979-1997 has been modified to match the trend of Randel and Wu (1999). In the runs given on the present page and in the Imbalance paper, the stratospheric ozone depletion in 1979-1997 was inadvertently only 5/9 as large as suggested by Randel and Wu. Use of the full Randel and Wu ozone depletion reduces the 1880-2003 climate forcing from 1.80 W/m2 to 1.78 W/m2.

To display plots of the model data, select the type of output you wish to view from the following:

References

Hansen, J., L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, J. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G.A. Schmidt, and N. Tausnev 2005. Earth's energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science, 308, 1431-1435, doi:10.1126/science.1110252.

Randel, W., and F. Wu, 1999. A stratospheric ozone trends data set for global modeling studies. Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 3089-3092.

Contact

Please address questions about these "Imbalance" webpages to Dr. Reto Ruedy.

Also participating in this research were Drs. James E. Hansen, Larissa Nazarenko and Makiko Sato.