Serendipity

We now have a fourth paper added to our special issue of the journal Geoscientific Model Development, on Community software to support the delivery of CMIP5. All papers are open access:

• M. Stockhause, H. Höck, F. Toussaint, and M. Lautenschlager, Quality assessment concept of the World Data Center for Climate and its application to CMIP5 data, Geosci. Model Dev., 5, 1023-1032, 2012.
  Describes the distributed quality control concept that was developed for handling the terabytes of data generated from CMIP5, and the challenges in ensuring data integrity (also includes a useful glossary in an appendix).
• B. N. Lawrence, V. Balaji, P. Bentley, S. Callaghan, C. DeLuca, S. Denvil, G. Devine, M. Elkington, R. W. Ford, E. Guilyardi, M. Lautenschlager, M. Morgan, M.-P. Moine, S. Murphy, C. Pascoe, H. Ramthun, P. Slavin, L. Steenman-Clark, F. Toussaint, A. Treshansky, and S. Valcke, Describing Earth system simulations with the Metafor CIM, Geosci. Model Dev., 5, 1493-1500, 2012.
  Explains the Common Information Model, which was developed to describe climate model experiments in a uniform way, including the model used, the experimental setup and the resulting simulation.
• S. Valcke, V. Balaji, A. Craig, C. DeLuca, R. Dunlap, R. W. Ford, R. Jacob, J. Larson, R. O’Kuinghttons, G. D. Riley, and M. Vertenstein, Coupling technologies for Earth System Modelling, Geosci. Model Dev., 5, 1589-1596, 2012.
  An overview paper that compares different approaches to model coupling used by different earth system models in the CMIP5 ensemble.
• S. Valcke, The OASIS3 coupler: a European climate modelling community software, Geosci. Model Dev., 6, 373-388, 2013 (See also the Supplement)
  A detailed description of the OASIS3 coupler, which is used in all the European models contributing to CMIP5. The OASIS User Guide is included as a supplement to this paper.

(Note: technically speaking, the call for papers for this issue is still open – if there are more software aspects of CMIP5 that you want to write about, feel free to submit them!)