Developments in the MPI‐M Earth System Model version 1.2 (MPI‐ESM1.2) and Its Response to Increasing CO₂

TLDR

MPI-ESM1.2 was upgraded by correcting coding errors, enhancing atmospheric radiation and aerosol schemes, refining cloud, convection, turbulence, land soil hydrology, nitrogen cycle, wildfire, and ocean biogeochemistry modules, and tuning to match instrumental warming, thereby improving physical realism, computational performance, and user friendliness. The updated MPI-ESM1.2 release demonstrates a climate sensitivity to CO₂ doubling of approximately 7 K.

Abstract

A new release of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Earth System Model version 1.2 (MPI-ESM1.2) is presented. The development focused on correcting errors in and improving the physical processes representation, as well as improving the computational performance, versatility, and overall user friendliness. In addition to new radiation and aerosol parameterizations of the atmosphere, several relatively large, but partly compensating, coding errors in the model's cloud, convection, and turbulence parameterizations were corrected. The representation of land processes was refined by introducing a multilayer soil hydrology scheme, extending the land biogeochemistry to include the nitrogen cycle, replacing the soil and litter decomposition model and improving the representation of wildfires. The ocean biogeochemistry now represents cyanobacteria prognostically in order to capture the response of nitrogen fixation to changing climate conditions and further includes improved detritus settling and numerous other refinements. As something new, in addition to limiting drift and minimizing certain biases, the instrumental record warming was explicitly taken into account during the tuning process. To this end, a very high climate sensitivity of around 7 K caused by low-level clouds in the tropics as found in an intermediate model version was addressed, as it was not deemed possible to match observed warming otherwise. As a result, the model has a climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO