GFDL Data Contributions to IPCC AR5

For the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), GFDL used an average of 42% of the lab’s High-Performance Computer System over 22 months. This represents 13% of the system over the six-year period since GFDL ran experiments for the last IPCC Assessment Report, AR4.

GFDL participates in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), an international effort to improve climate models by comparing multiple model simulations to observations and to each other, using standardized protocols. CMIP has coordinated five large model intercomparison projects, with a set of designated experiments for participating models, which have been used in each IPCC assessment report since 1990. The Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, CMIP5, was used in support of AR5. CMIP uses distributed data serving to make all data from these experiments available to the public.

GFDL’s contribution to CMIP5, 188 TB of data, is comparable to the entire CMIP3 archive (all experiments, from every participating model) used to support IPCC 4th Assessment in 2007.

GFDL’s CMIP5 contribution, by model:

CM2.1 (Decadal Prediction)	10TB
Earth System Models	128TB
CM3	30TB
HiRAM	22TB
Total	188TB

Amount of data downloaded from GFDL’s own Data Portal, from January 1, 2010 to July 29, 2013:

• 1,180,000 successful requests for data, from over 30 countries
• 753,000 different files downloaded
• 1,600 different IP addresses accessing the data
• 460 TB of data downloaded
• 152.3 megabytes, average size of transfer