The DOE Parallel Climate Model is a comprehensive earth system climate
model which includes state-of-the-art components of the atmosphere, ocean,
land, and sea ice. It was designed and developed to run efficiently on
contemporary distributed memory, multiple processor, cache based computer
architectures.
During the past four years over 9000 years of the earth's climate have
been simulated, including a 1000 year control simulation of the 1870
(pre-industrial) climate, ensembles of the historical 1870-2000
climate, and ensembles of various scenarios projecting climate changes thru
the 21st century. The historical simulation set accurately reproduces many
of the climate changes which have been observed during the 20th century,
including the apparent variability caused by increases in the Greenhouse
gases and sulfate aerosols, and changes due to solar variance and volcanic
activity. The future simulation set has been used by the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the potential and magnitude of
anthropogenic changes to the earth's climate.
The PCM simulation model also reproduces events, such as the El Nino
in the central Pacific Ocean, which are believed to cause significant
decadal climate variability. PCM output has been used by DOE colleagues
to initialize regional climate models, in order that changes in waterflow
patterns in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, for example, can
be projected into the future.
