Climate modelers and scientists from around the world are invited to help improve the next generation of Coupled Model Intercomparisons and submit their comments before 15 September 2014.

Since 1995, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) has coordinated climate model experiments involving multiple international modeling teams. Through CMIP, climate modelers and scientists from around the world have analyzed and compared state-of-the-art climate model simulations to gain insights into the processes, mechanisms, and consequences of climate variability and climate change. This has led to a better understanding of past, present, and future climate, and CMIP model experiments have routinely been the basis for future climate change assessments made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

An initial design for CMIP6 has now been developed (Meehl et al., EOS, 2014) that is open for comments from the community until 15 September 2014. This includes a small set of experiments to be routinely performed by modeling groups whenever they develop a new model version. The output from these so-called ongoing CMIP Diagnostic, Evaluation and Characterization of Klima (DECK) experiments will be distributed for community use via the ESGF infrastructure. Other Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) will build on the CMIP DECK experiments and augment them to address a broad range of scientific questions. Additionally proposed MIP experiments together with the CMIP DECK experiments will constitute the suite of simulations for the next phase of CMIP.

MIPs are now invited to request endorsement for the next phase of CMIP (i.e., CMIP6). A CMIP6-Endorsed MIP may propose that a subset or even all of their experiments be included as part of the suite of simulations constituting CMIP6, see further information in the template for these applications which is available on the CMIP Panel website. This website also lists the current active MIPs under ‘Catalogue of MIPs’. The co-chairs of these MIPs have been informed by the CMIP Panel and WGCM co-chairs that the application for CMIP6-Endorsed MIPs is now open.