The CRESCENDO project facilitates a coordinated European contribution to the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) where the climate research community compares a range of International ESMs using common sets of experimental protocols, to improve our knowledge of the Earth’s climate processes and provide the best possible future projections to governments and decision-makers. CRESCENDO in particular better informs a number of key Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) where biogeochemical and aerosol components are of critical importance to delivering realistic future projections. Such components include: the terrestrial and marine carbon cycle, vegetation processes, permafrost, atmospheric chemistry and aerosols.
CRESCENDO brings together 7 European Earth System Modelling (ESM) teams and 3 European Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) groups, with experts in ESM performance evaluation, ESM future projection analysis, climate impacts, regional downscaling and science communication, representing 10 European countries.
Project Goals
The primary aims of CRESCENDO are:
1. IMPROVE the representation of key processes in European Earth System Models (ESMs).
2. EVALUATE thoroughly the scientific performance of these models.
3. USE the models to generate a new set of Earth system projections for the coming century and coordinate a European contribution to CMIP6 ensuring new socio-economics scenarios.
4. ENSURE knowledge developed in the project is communicated to key stakeholder communities in an engaging and understandable form.
Role of SMHI
SMHI will coordinate EC-Earth modelling efforts in the project. This will include improving the representation of key processes in EC-Earth, evaluating the model and performing climate simulations.
SMHI leads Work Package 12, where CRESCENDO´s ESMs will perform a set of projections for the scenarios developed in the project and which will be part of CMIP6-ScenarioMIP.
SMHI is also coordinating the Knowledge Dissemination task (WP13), targeting a range of groups including: policy and decision makers, the international climate research community, climate impacts and regional downscaling communities, adaptation and mitigation researchers and the general public.
Project partners
The project is led by Prof Colin Jones from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) (UK) and the University of Leeds. CRESCENDO brings together 7 European Earth System Modelling teams and 3 European Integrated Assessment Modelling teams with a total of 25 partners, representing 10 European countries. The complete list of project partners can be found here.
Funding
CRESCENDO is a European Union Horizon 2020 Project funded under the program SC5-01-2014: Advanced Earth-system models under grant agreement No 641816.
Timeline
CRESCENDO will run from 2015 to 2020.