• The global climate model EC-Earth consists of the atmosphere model IFS (Integrated Forecast System, ECMWF-weather prediction model) and the ocean model NEMO (Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean including the sea ice model LIM3 (Louvain Ice Model, Vancoppenolle et al., 2008).
• The regional Arctic model RCAO (Döscher et al., 2009) consists of the atmosphere model RCA and the ocean model RCO. RCAO also includes the sea ice model HELMI and the dynamic surface vegetation model LPJ-GUESS (Smith et al., 2001). RCAO provides a downscaling option for the EC-Earth integrations. The horizontal resolution of RCA and RCO will be increased to 0.25°, and up to ~5 km for a version of RCA.
• Permafrost model GIPL 2.0 (developed at the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska).
References
Döscher, R., K. Wyser, H.E.M. Meier, M. Qian, R. Redler, 2009: Quantifying Arctic Contributions to Climate Predictability in a regional coupled Ocean-Ice-Atmosphere Model. Climate Dynamcis, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-009-0567-y, accepted for publication.
Smith, B., Prentice, I.C. & Sykes, M.T. 2001. Representation of vegetation dynamics in modelling of terrestrial ecosystems:
comparing two contrasting approaches within European climate space. Global Ecology and Biogeography 10: 621-637.
Vancoppenolle, M, Fichefet T, Goosse H, Bouillon S, Beatty CK, Morales Maqueda MA, 2008: LIM3, an advanced sea-ice model for climate simulation and operational oceanography. Mercator Newsletter 28.