paleoWeather: CESM-HR simulations with water isotopes for the mid-Piazencian Warm Period
d651090
Supported by an Accelerated Scientific Discovery (ASD) Derecho computing grant (ACGD0008 to Otto-Bliesner; paleo-Weather), high-resolution Community Earth System Model (CESM-HR) simulation of the mid-Piacenzian Warm Period (~3 million years ago) has been completed. The high-resolution simulation includes water isotope capability, enabling direct comparisons with isotope records of past and present climate change from a range of archives. The simulation followed the protocols of the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project (PlioMIP2) and was run with atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 400 ppmv inferred from the geological record. The simulation was initialized from a near-equilibrated, low-resolution companion simulation and integrated for 60 years. The mid-Piacenzian Warm Period dataset is one of four high-resolution simulation datasets produced through the ASD paleo-Weather project. The other datasets represent the Preindustrial, Last Glacial Maximum, and two Early Eocene Climatic Optimum. Establishing separate GDEX dataset records for each period will allow the respective leads who set up and ran the simulation to serve as leads for the corresponding DOI. Each GDEX landing page will include links to the other paleo-Weather simulations, enabling discovery and comparison across climate periods. To our knowledge, the ASD paleo-Weather collection represents the first high-resolution paleoclimate simulation suite of this kind made available to the community. Its horizontal grid spacing is approximately ten times finer than traditional climate-model configurations, which typically use resolutions of 1 to 2 degrees. The CESM-HR resolution more realistically represents synoptic- and mesoscale atmospheric and oceanic phenomena, together with their interactions with large-scale circulation. The mid-Piacenzian Warm Period dataset will support research on weather/climate interactions in a warm-climate state, including studies of extreme events such as heat waves, atmospheric rivers, and tropical cyclones. More broadly, the paleo-Weather simulations complement the MESACLIP historical and future simulations, providing opportunities to investigate links between climate and weather extremes across past, present, and future climate states.
dataset
https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d651090/
protocol: https
name: Dataset Description
description: Related Link
function: information
https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d651090/dataaccess/
protocol: https
name: Data Access
description: Related Link
function: download
climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere
dataset
revision
2021-03-30
CESM > NCAR Community Earth System Model
revision
2026-09-02
EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > PRECIPITATION > PRECIPITATION RATE
EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE > SURFACE TEMPERATURE
EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE > SEA LEVEL PRESSURE
EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC WINDS > UPPER LEVEL WINDS
EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR > WATER VAPOR INDICATORS > HUMIDITY > RELATIVE HUMIDITY
revision
2026-09-02
publication
2026-09-15
notPlanned
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
None
pointOfContact
NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange
name: NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange
description: The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX), managed by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NSF NCAR, contains a large collection of meteorological, atmospheric composition, and oceanographic observations, and operational and reanalysis model outputs, integrated with NSF NCAR High Performance Compute services to support atmospheric and geosciences research.
function: download
pointOfContact
2026-09-15T17:15:05Z