UKESM (UK Earth System Model) is a partnership project across 8 NERC centres and The Met Office, which develops and uses advanced Earth Systems Models to support UK and international efforts to understand and tackle climate change, focusing on components including interactive land ice sheets.
Funded by UKRI NERC, and in partnership with the Met Office, UKESM use their models to investigate Earth system phenomena to provide future projections and provide guidance, tools and support for UK Earth Systems Modelling research as well as inform policies and engage with the public on climate change issues.
UKESM is the UK’s first Earth System Model. Based on the Met Office core Global Climate Model (HadGEM3) UKESM provides robust projections of the Earth system response to anthropogenic climate forcing, incorporating all relevant processes and interactions. This includes marine ice sheet instability and Arctic sea ice loss.
The role of CPOM
CPOM is supporting on the integration of the BISICLES ice sheet model and advanced sea ice physics into UKESM, developing the interface that couples the model to NEMO and JULES, evaluating UKESM with our satellite datasets, and performing coupled simulations for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a project which contributed significantly to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
The future of UKESM
Going forward UKESM will apply its models to investigate Earth system phenomena, the risk of rapid or irreversible change to the coupled Earth System and examine mitigation options to limit future climate changes. UKESM will also be employed to review the evolution of the global climate system over the past century. In the coming years work will start on the development of UKESM2, the next generation of models.
