The Flexible Global Ocean‐Atmosphere‐Land System Model Grid‐Point Version 3 (FGOALS‐g3): Description and Evaluation.

This paper introduces the Flexible Global Ocean‐Atmosphere‐Land System Model: Grid‐Point Version 3 (FGOALS‐g3) and evaluates its basic performance based on some of its participation in the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) experiments. Our results show that many significant improvements have been achieved by FGOALS‐g3 in terms of climatological mean states, variabilities, and long‐term trends. For example, FGOALS‐g3 has a small (−0.015°C/100 yr) climate drift in 700‐yr preindustrial control (piControl) runs and smaller biases in climatological mean variables, such as the land/sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and seasonal soil moisture cycle, compared with its previous version FGOALS‐g2 during the historical period. The characteristics of climate variabilities, for example, Madden‐Julian oscillation (MJO) eastward/westward propagation ratios, spatial patterns of interannual variability of tropical SST anomalies, and relationship between the East Asian Summer Monsoon and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), are well captured by FGOALS‐g3. In particular, the cooling trend of globally averaged surface temperature during 1940–1970, which is a challenge for most CMIP3 and CMIP5 models, is well reproduced by FGOALS‐g3 in historical runs. In addition to the external forcing factors recommended by CMIP6, anthropogenic groundwater forcing from 1965 to 2014 was incorporated into the FGOALS‐g3 historical runs. Plain Language Summary: The sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) is a crucial support for the sixth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) and will also provide important foundation for research in climate change in the next few years. This paper gives the description of FGOALS‐g3 model, its experiment configures, and the experiments conducted according to the experimental design of CMIP6 and evaluates the preliminary performance of model simulation. This work offers references to CMIP6 data users and provides enormous output data sets for assessing and understanding climate change. Key Points: This paper describes FGOALS‐g3 and its experiment design for CMIP6Historical, preindustrial, and scenario simulations are evaluatedClimate drift is small in preindustrial simulation, and mean climate and climate variabilities at different temporal scales are realistic in historical runs [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]