UKESM1: Description and evaluation of the UK Earth System Model

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (2019)

We describe the development and behaviour of UKESM1, a novel climate model that includes improved representations of processes in the atmosphere, ocean, and on land.

Ensuring realistic process behaviour is a major challenge in the development of our model, and we have carefully tested this. UKESM1 performs well, correctly exhibiting stable results from a continuous pre‐industrial simulation (used to provide a reference for future experiments) and showing good agreement with observations toward the end of its historical simulations.

Results for some properties—including the degree to which average surface temperature changes with increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—are examined here.