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Despite many years of extensive research, the evolution of Tropical Cyclone (TC) activity in our changing climate remains uncertain. This is partly because the answer to that question relies primarily on climate simulations with horizontal resolutions of a few tens of kilometers. Such simulations have only recently become accessible for most modeling centers, including the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL). Using recent numerical developments in the IPSL model, we perform a series of historical atmospheric-only simulations that follow the HighResMIP protocol. We assess the impact of increasing the resolution from ∼ 200 to 25 km on TC activity. In agreement with previous work, we find a systematic improvement of TC activity with increasing resolution with respect to the observations. However, a clear signature of TC frequencies convergence with resolution is still lacking. Cyclogenesis geographical distributions also improve at the scale of individual basins. This is particularly true of the North Atlantic, where the agreement with the observed distribution is impressive at 25 km. In agreement with the observations, TC activity correlates with the large-scale environment and ENSO in that basin. By contrast, TC frequencies remain too small in the Western North Pacific at 25 km, where significant biases of humidity and vorticity are found compared to the reanalysis. Despite the few minor weaknesses we identified, our results demonstrate that the IPSL model is a suitable tool for studying TCs on climate time scales. This work thus opens the way for further studies contributing to our understanding of TC climatology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New (a)biotic conditions, resulting from climate change, are expected to change disturbance dynamics, e.g., wind throw, forest fires and insect outbreaks, and their interactions. Unprecedented natural disturbance 30 dynamics might alter the capability of forest ecosystems to buffer atmospheric CO2 increases in the atmosphere, even leading to the risk that forests transform from sinks into sources of CO2. This study aims to enhance the capability of the ORCHIDEE land surface model to study the impacts of climate change on bark beetle dynamics and subsequent effects on forest functioning. The bark beetle outbreak model is based on previous work by Temperli et al. 2013 for the LandClim landscape model. The new implementation of this model in ORCHIDEE r7791 35 accounts for the following differences between ORCHIDEE and LandClim: (1) the coarser spatial resolution of ORCHIDEE, (2) the higher temporal resolution of ORCHIDEE, and (3) the pre-existing process representation of wind throw, drought, and forest structure in ORCHIDEE. Qualitative evaluation demonstrated the model's ability to simulate a wide range of observed post-disturbance forest dynamics: (1) resistance to bark beetle infestation even in the presence of windthrow events; (2) slow transition (3-7 years) from an endemic into an epidemic bark beetle population following medium intensity window events at cold locations; and (3) fast transition (1-3 years) from endemic to epidemic triggered by strong windthrow events. Although all simulated sites eventually recovered from disturbances, the time needed to recover varied from 5 to 10 years depending on the disturbance dynamics. In addition to enhancing the functionality of the ORCHIDEE model, the new bark beetle model represents a fundamental change in the way mortality is simulated as it replaces a framework in which mortality is conceived as a continuous process by one in which mortality is represented by abrupt events. Changing the mortality framework provided new insights into carbon balance estimates, showing the risk of overestimating the short-term sequestration potential under the commonly used continuous mortality framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the feasibility of using a variable resolution global general circulation model (GCM), with telescopic zooming and enhanced resolution (~35 km) over South Asia, to better understand regional aspects of the South Asian monsoon rainfall distribution and the interactions between monsoon circulation and precipitation. For this purpose, two sets of ten member realizations are produced with and without zooming using the LMDZ (Laboratoire Meteorologie Dynamique and Z stands for zoom) GCM. The simulations without zoom correspond to a uniform 1° × 1° grid with the same total number of grid points as in the zoom version. So the grid of the zoomed simulations is finer inside the region of interest but coarser outside. The use of these finer and coarser resolution ensemble members allows us to examine the impact of resolution on the overall quality of the simulated regional monsoon fields. It is found that the monsoon simulation with high-resolution zooming greatly improves the representation of the southwesterly monsoon flow and the heavy precipitation along the narrow orography of the Western Ghats, the northeastern mountain slopes and northern Bay of Bengal (BOB). A realistic Monsoon Trough (MT) is also noticed in the zoomed simulation, together with remarkable improvements in representing the associated precipitation and circulation features, as well as the large-scale organization of meso-scale convective systems over the MT region. Additionally, a more reasonable simulation of the monsoon synoptic disturbances (lows and disturbances) along the MT is noted in the high-resolution zoomed simulation. On the other hand, the no-zoom version has limitations in capturing the depressions and their movement, so that the MT zone is relatively dry in this case. Overall, the results from this work demonstrate the usefulness of the high-resolution variable resolution LMDZ model in realistically capturing the interactions among the monsoon large-scale dynamics, the synoptic systems and the meso-scale convective systems, which are essential elements of the South Asian monsoon system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is motivated by the identification of the land‐atmosphere interactions as one of the key sources of uncertainty in climate change simulations. It documents new developments in related processes, namely, boundary layer/convection/clouds parameterizations and land surface parameterization in the Earth System Model of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL). Simulations forced by prescribed oceanic conditions are produced with different combinations of atmospheric and land surface parameterizations. They are used to explore the sensitivity to the atmospheric physics and/or soil physics of major biases in the near surface variables over continents,the energy and moisture coupling established at the soil/atmosphere interface in not too wet (energy limited) and not too dry (moisture limited) soil moisture regions also known as transition or "hot‐spot" regions,the river runoff at the outlet of major rivers. The package implemented in the IPSL‐Climate Model for the Phase 6 of the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) allows us to reduce several biases in the surface albedo, the snow cover, and the continental surface air temperature in summer as well as in the temperature profile in the surface layer of the polar regions. The interactions between soil moisture and atmosphere in hotspot regions are in better agreement with the observations. Rainfall is also significantly improved in volume and seasonality in several major river basins leading to an overall improvement in river discharge. However, the lack of consideration of floodplains and human influences in the model, for example, dams and irrigation, impacts the realism of simulated discharge. Plain Language Summary: Land surface‐atmosphere interactions play an essential role in the climate system. They strongly modulate the regional climates and have impacts on the global scale for instance through freshwater release into the oceans. Climate hazards (heat waves, droughts) and their impacts on populations also strongly depend on interactions between land and atmosphere and on their evolution with climate change. Climate models are precious tools to investigate how the Earth climate behaves. The sixth phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) provides important tools to measure the progress and address the remaining open questions regarding the continental climate modeling. The representation of the land‐atmosphere coupled system by the IPSL‐Climate Model involved in CMIP6 is thoroughly evaluated against observations and compared with simulations using the CMIP5 version. Several biases concerning the temperature over land and over the ice sheets and with the snow cover are significantly reduced. Numerous improvements were made developping advanced parameterizations and tuning of the radiation and of the turbulent mixing in the atmospheric model. The realism of the seasonal cycle of hydrological variables such as the precipitation or the river discharge is also improved over many regions. The new treatment of hydrology paves the way for future developments on water resource aspects in the climate model. Key Points: The representation of the land‐atmosphere coupled system by the IPSL model is thoroughly evaluatedImprovements with respect to previous versions are documented in the context of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, CMIPAdvanced parameterization of land and atmospheric processes, tuning of the radiation, and the turbulent mixing yielded many improvements [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)-generation previous Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL) Earth system model, we designed a new version, IPSL-CM5A2, aiming at running multi-millennial simulations typical of deep-time paleoclimate studies. Three priorities were followed during the setup of the model: (1) improving the overall model computing performance, (2) overcoming a persistent cold bias depicted in the previous model generation and (3) making the model able to handle the specific continental configurations of the geological past. These developments include the integration of hybrid parallelization Message Passing Interface – Open Multi-Processing (MPI-OpenMP) in the atmospheric model of the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMDZ), the use of a new library to perform parallel asynchronous input/output by using computing cores as "I/O servers" and the use of a parallel coupling library between the ocean and the atmospheric components. The model, which runs with an atmospheric resolution of 3.75∘×1.875∘ and 2 to 0.5 ∘ in the ocean, can now simulate ∼100 years per day, opening new possibilities towards the production of multi-millennial simulations with a full Earth system model. The tuning strategy employed to overcome a persistent cold bias is detailed. The confrontation of a historical simulation to climatological observations shows overall improved ocean meridional overturning circulation, marine productivity and latitudinal position of zonal wind patterns. We also present the numerous steps required to run IPSL-CM5A2 for deep-time paleoclimates through a preliminary case study for the Cretaceous. Namely, specific work on the ocean model grid was required to run the model for specific continental configurations in which continents are relocated according to past paleogeographic reconstructions. By briefly discussing the spin-up of such a simulation, we elaborate on the requirements and challenges awaiting paleoclimate modeling in the next years, namely finding the best trade-off between the level of description of the processes and the computing cost on supercomputers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of boundary conditions is a key aspect of climate simulations. We describe here how the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) forcing data sets have been processed and implemented in Version 6 of the Institut Pierre‐Simon Laplace (IPSL) climate model (IPSL‐CM6A‐LR) as used for CMIP6. Details peculiar to some of the Model Intercomparison Projects are also described. IPSL‐CM6A‐LR is run without interactive chemistry; thus, tropospheric and stratospheric aerosols as well as ozone have to be prescribed. We improved the aerosol interpolation procedure and highlight a new methodology to adjust the ozone vertical profile in a way that is consistent with the model dynamical state at the time step level. The corresponding instantaneous and effective radiative forcings have been estimated and are being presented where possible. Plain Language Summary: Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 is an international project to compare the results from climate model simulations performed according to a common protocol. Such simulations require boundary conditions (called "climate forcings"), which are fed to the models in order to represent, for example, long‐lived greenhouse gases, ozone, atmospheric aerosols, or land surface properties. The same forcing data sets are used by the different modeling groups who carry out the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 simulations; however, their implementation may differ as it depends on the model structure. This article gives details of how these forcing data were implemented in the IPSL‐CM6A‐LR model. Some of the forcing data are common to all types all simulations, whereas others depend on the runs considered. Radiative forcings, as estimated in the model, are presented for some of the forcing mechanisms. Key Points: We present how the CMIP6 forcing data were implemented in the IPSL‐CM6A‐LR climate model for the realization of the CMIP6 set of climate simulationsAn improved conservative interpolation procedure for emissions is detailed and illustrated to compute tropospheric aerosolsWe present a new methodology to adjust the prescribed ozone vertical profile to match the model atmospheric dynamical state around the tropopause [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the CMIP5-generation previous IPSL earth system model, we designed a new version, IPSL-CM5A2, aiming at running multi-millennial simulations typical of deep-time paleoclimates studies. Three priorities were followed during the set-up of the model: (1) improving the overall model computing performance, (2) overcoming a persistent cold bias depicted in the previous model generation, and (3) making the model able to handle the specific continental configurations of the geological past. Technical developments have been performed on separate components and on the coupling system to speed up the whole coupled model. These developments include the integration of hybrid parallelization MPI-OpenMP in LMDz atmospheric component, the use of a new library to perform parallel asynchronous input/output by using computing cores as "IO servers", the use of a parallel coupling library between the ocean and the atmospheric components. The model can now simulate ~100 years per day, opening new possibilities towards the production of multi-millennial simulations with a full earth system model. The tuning strategy employed to overcome a persistent cold bias is detailed. The confrontation of an historical simulation to climatological observations shows overall improved ocean meridional overturning circulation, marine productivity and latitudinal position of zonal wind patterns. We also present the numerous steps required to run the IPSL-CM5A2 for deep-time paleoclimates through a preliminary case-study for the Cretaceous. Namely, a specific work on the ocean model grid was required to run the model for specific continental configurations in which continents are relocated according to past paleogeographic reconstructions. By briefly discussing the spin-up of such a simulation, we elaborate on the requirements and challenges awaiting paleoclimate modelling in the next years, namely finding the best trade-off between the level of description of the processes and the computing cost on supercomputers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrogen is an essential element controlling ecosystem carbon (C) productivity and its response to climate change and atmospheric [ CO2 ] increase. This study presents the evaluation – focussing on gross primary production (GPP) – of a new version of the ORCHIDEE model that gathers the representation of the nitrogen cycle and of its interactions with the carbon cycle from the OCN model and the most recent developments from the ORCHIDEE trunk version. We quantify the model skills at 78 FLUXNET sites by simulating the observed mean seasonal cycle, daily mean flux variations, and annual mean average GPP flux for grasslands and forests. Accounting for carbon–nitrogen interactions does not substantially change the main skills of ORCHIDEE, except for the site-to-site annual mean GPP variations, for which the version with carbon–nitrogen interactions is in better agreement with observations. However, the simulated GPP response to idealised [ CO2 ] enrichment simulations is highly sensitive to whether or not carbon–nitrogen interactions are accounted for. Doubling of the atmospheric [ CO2 ] induces an increase in the GPP, but the site-averaged GPP response to a CO2 increase projected by the model version with carbon–nitrogen interactions is half of the increase projected by the version without carbon–nitrogen interactions. This model's differentiated response has important consequences for the transpiration rate, which is on average 50 mm yr -1 lower with the version with carbon–nitrogen interactions. Simulated annual GPP for northern, tropical and southern latitudes shows good agreement with the observation-based MTE-GPP (model tree ensemble gross primary production) product for present-day conditions. An attribution experiment making use of this new version of ORCHIDEE for the time period 1860–2016 suggests that global GPP has increased by 50 %, the main driver being the enrichment of land in reactive nitrogen (through deposition and fertilisation), followed by the [ CO2 ] increase. Based on our factorial experiment and sensitivity analysis, we conclude that if carbon–nitrogen interactions are accounted for, the functional responses of ORCHIDEE r4999 better agree with the current understanding of photosynthesis than when the carbon–nitrogen interactions are not accounted for and that carbon–nitrogen interactions are essential in understanding global terrestrial ecosystem productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrogen is an essential element controlling ecosystem carbon (C) productivity and its response to climate change and atmospheric [CO2] increase. This study presents the evaluation - focussing on gross primary production (GPP) - of a new version of the ORCHIDEE model that gathers the representation of the nitrogen cycle and of its interactions with the carbon cycle from the OCN model and the most recent developments from the ORCHIDEE trunk version. We quantify the model skills at 78 Fluxnet sites by simulating the observed mean seasonal cycle, daily mean flux variations, and annual mean average GPP flux for grasslands and forests. Accounting for carbon-nitrogen interactions does not substantially change the main skills of ORCHIDEE, except for the site-to-site annual mean GPP variations, for which the version with carbon-nitrogen interactions is in better agreement to observations. However, the simulated GPP response to idealized [CO2] enrichment simulations is highly sensitive to whether or not carbon-nitrogen interactions are accounted for. Doubling of the atmospheric [CO2] induces an increase of the GPP, but the site-averaged GPP response to CO2 increase projected by the model version with carbon-nitrogen interactions is half of the increase projected by the version without carbon-nitrogen interactions. This model's differentiated response has important consequences for the transpiration rate, which is on average 50 mm yr-1 lower with the version with carbon-nitrogen interactions. Simulated annual GPP for northern, tropical and southern latitudes shows good agreement with the observation-based MTE-GPP product for present-day conditions. An attribution experiment making use of this new version of ORCHIDEE for the time period 1860-2016 suggests that global GPP has increased by 50%, the main driver being the enrichment of land in reactive nitrogen (through deposition and fertilization), followed by the [CO2] increase. Based on our factorial experiment and sensitivity analysis, we conclude that if carbon-nitrogen interactions are accounted for, the functional responses of ORCHIDEE r4999 better agrees with current understanding of photosynthesis than when the carbon-nitrogen interactions are not accounted for, and that carbon-nitrogen interactions are essential in understanding global terrestrial ecosystem productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IPSL-CM5A climate model was used to perform a large number of control, historical and climate change simulations in the frame of CMIP5. The refined horizontal and vertical grid of the atmospheric component, LMDZ, constitutes a major difference compared to the previous IPSL-CM4 version used for CMIP3. From imposed-SST (Sea Surface Temperature) and coupled numerical experiments, we systematically analyze the impact of the horizontal and vertical grid resolution on the simulated climate. The refinement of the horizontal grid results in a systematic reduction of major biases in the mean tropospheric structures and SST. The mid-latitude jets, located too close to the equator with the coarsest grids, move poleward. This robust feature, is accompanied by a drying at mid-latitudes and a reduction of cold biases in mid-latitudes relative to the equator. The model was also extended to the stratosphere by increasing the number of layers on the vertical from 19 to 39 (15 in the stratosphere) and adding relevant parameterizations. The 39-layer version captures the dominant modes of the stratospheric variability and exhibits stratospheric sudden warmings. Changing either the vertical or horizontal resolution modifies the global energy balance in imposed-SST simulations by typically several W/m which translates in the coupled atmosphere-ocean simulations into a different global-mean SST. The sensitivity is of about 1.2 K per 1 W/m when varying the horizontal grid. A re-tuning of model parameters was thus required to restore this energy balance in the imposed-SST simulations and reduce the biases in the simulated mean surface temperature and, to some extent, latitudinal SST variations in the coupled experiments for the modern climate. The tuning hardly compensates, however, for robust biases of the coupled model. Despite the wide range of grid configurations explored and their significant impact on the present-day climate, the climate sensitivity remains essentially unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater (GW) constitutes by far the largest volume of liquid freshwater on Earth. The most active part is soil moisture (SM), recognized as a key variable of land/atmosphere interactions, especially in so-called transition zones, where/when SM varies between wet and dry values. But GW can also be stored in deeper reservoirs than soils, in particular unconfined aquifer systems, in which the saturated part is called the water table (WT). The latter is characterized by slow and mostly horizontal water flows towards the river network, with well-known buffering effects on streamflow variability. Where/when the WT is shallow enough, it can also sustain SM by means of capillary rise, thus increase evapotranspiration (ET), with potential impact on the climate system (including temperatures and precipitation). The large residence time of GW may also increase the Earth system's memory, with consequences on the persistence of extreme events, hydro-climatic predictability, and anthropogenic climate change, particularly the magnitude of regional warming. Here, our main goal is to explore the impacts of GW on historical and future climate, by comparing integrations from three different climate models (CESM, CNRM-CM, IPSL-CM). Their land surface component explicitly describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of GW with GW-SM interactions, but these processes are based on different physical assumptions representative of the state of the art (e.g. scale of GW flow, active depth, input parameters). For each climate model, two transient land-atmosphere simulations are performed, one with GW and the other one without GW, by deactivating the related processes. Each transient simulation is made of the concatenation of (i) one AMIP simulation, with historical sea forcing over 1979-2014, (ii) one "FutureAMIP" simulation from 2015 to 2100, corresponding to the SSP5-8.5 radiative forcing, with sea forcing deduced from a corresponding fully coupled CNRM-CM simulation (from ScenarioMIP). Within this framework, we want to assess the sensitivity of the simulated climate to GW in a systematic way, by trying to identify robust features among the three models. Our main objectives are twofold: (1) Compare GW and NO-GW AMIP simulations to observations to assess if accounting for GW improves some simulated land or climate parameters; (2) Compare FutureAMIP to AMIP simulations to assess if GW is able to alter the manifestations of climate change. For instance, can we get weaker regional warming in areas with significant GW-SM interactions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater (GW) constitutes by far the largest volume of liquid freshwater on Earth. The most active part is soil moisture (SM), recognized as a key variable of land/atmosphere interactions. But GW can also be stored in deeper reservoirs than soils, characterized by slow and mostly horizontal water flows towards the river network. These flows end up forming baseflow, with well-known buffering effects on streamflow variability. But they also contribute to sustain high SM in many areas, like in lowland areas surrounding streams, which are among the most frequent wetlands (floodplains and smaller riparian wetlands).In the standard version of the ORCHIDEE land surface model, the sole effect of GW is on river discharge, using a linear reservoir model to represent GW storage and baseflow in each grid-cell, with no feedback on local SM. To describe the interactions between GW flow and soil moisture, we introduced a new sub-grid fraction, corresponding to the lowland parts of the grid-cell, and acting as a buffer between the upland areas, supplying most GW recharge, and the river system eventually draining GW flow. For simplicity, this fraction is constant in each grid-cell, and prescribed from a global-scale wetland map recently designed to this purpose (Tootchi et al., 2019). The lowland fraction is described as a separate hydrological element, with physically-based water flows relying on a fine vertical discretization. It is effectively wet when/where GW flow is sufficient, in which case a water table can build up, and feeds baseflow to the river, as well as enhanced evapotranspiration compared to the upland fraction.This new version is called ORCHIDEE-GWF (GW-fed Fraction) and we present here its first evaluation at global scale, both off-line (with prescribed atmospheric conditions from a meteorological forcing dataset) and coupled to the IPSL climate model. Compared to the reference version of ORCHIDEE, the main impacts of this new version relate to SM, evapotranspiration, river discharge, and soil thermal properties. They are quantified spatially, compared to several observation-based products to assess if ORCHIDEE-GWF helps obtaining more realistic simulations, and the sensitivity to key assumptions of this new parametrization ORCHIDEE-GWF is explored (soil depth, baseflow parameters).Tootchi, A., Jost, A., and Ducharne, A. (2019). Multi-source global wetland maps combining surface water imagery and groundwater constraints, Earth Syst. Sci. Data., accepted, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2018-87 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The typical resolution used in CMIP-class Earth system models limits, among others, the ability to assess climate risks that are associated with smaller-scale weather phenomena such as tropical cyclones. We introduce higher-resolution atmosphere-only simulations following the HighResMIP Tier1 protocol. A baseline simulation (LMDZ-OR) is run with LMD-Z, the atmospheric component of the IPSL-CM Earth System model, with CMIP6 physics including the land-surface model ORCHIDEE, at a resolution equivalent to 50km at mid-latitudes. Large-scale parallel I/O with on-the-fly data processing is enabled by the XIOS I/O server. In two additional simulations (ICO-LMDZ-OR), the LMD-Z latitude-longitude dynamical core is replaced by the more scalable DYNAMICO dynamical core, using icosahedral-hexagonal meshes with quasi-uniform resolution of 50km and 25km.We provide a description and preliminary analysis of these simulations. We present the scalability and throughput of LMDZ-OR and ICO-LMDZ-OR. Some differences between LMDZ-OR and ICO-LMDZ-OR with respect to the processing of input datasets, especially orography, are discussed. The climates in LMDZ-OR and ICO-LMD-OR simulations at similar resolutions are compared. Dependence on resolution of key climate features is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]