IITM-ESM

The underlying philosophy behind the IITM-ESM is based on developing a global modeling framework to address the science of climate change, including detection, attribution and future projections of global climate, with special emphasis on the South Asian monsoon. As a first step toward developing as ESM from a seasonal prediction model (CFSv2), an ocean model with biogeochemistry, and a better physics scheme for improving the biases of the ocean component in CFSv2, was incorporated. While the CFSv2 model has been skillful in predicting the Indian summer monsoon on seasonal time scales, a century-long simulation with it showed top-of-the atmosphere energy imbalance and a cold bias in global mean temperature and sea surface temperature. These biases limit the utility of CFSv2 to study climate change issues. The development activity of the IITM-ESM was initiated in 2011 and the first version (IITM ESM version 1) was developed by 2015, by transforming a state-of-the-art seasonal prediction model, CFSv2 [Saha et al., 2010], into a model suitable for long-term climate https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00276.1 [Swapna et al. 2015]