Experiment Setup and Forcings Guidance: esm-piControl

Pre-industrial control simulation with prescribed carbon dioxide emissions (for prescribed carbon dioxide concentrations, see piControl). Used to characterise natural variability and unforced behaviour.

This page is intended to help with implementation. If you notice something that is unclear, please raise an issue.

For the full background of the experiment, please see the following URLs:

Paired experiments

  • piControl is the concentration-driven counterpart to this emissions-driven experiment.

Experiment set up

Parent experiment and branching

The esm-piControl experiment branches from the esm-piControl-spinup experiment (part of CMIP). The parent experiment's MIP era is CMIP7.

Branch from esm-piControl-spinup at a time of your choosing.

Output time axis

You are free to start and end the time axis of your outputs at whatever time you like (e.g. starting at year 1, or 1850, or year 500). You must perform at least 400 simulation years.

Minimum ensemble size

Only one ensemble member is required.

Forcings

The following information will help you identify the forcings to use. However, we can't define every single detail because there can be lots of subjective steps between the raw forcings data and model inputs (e.g. interpolation, re-aggregation, supplementation with other information). If further guidance would be helpful, please raise an issue.

General headlines

The esm-piControl experiment is a fixed forcings experiment.

Data

Here we make a distinction between data that is described on other experiment pages, data that is described on other experiment pages with modifications you have to make yourself, data available via ESGF's input4MIPs project and data distributed via other channels.

Data described on other experiment pages

All data is described on the piControl experiment page.

Data described on other experiment pages with modifications you have to make

No data described on other experiment pages requires modifications by you. Please see the other data sub-sections for details of the forcings data to use for this experiment.

Data available via input4MIPs

No input4MIPs-based data is described specifically on this page. Please see the other data sub-sections for details of the forcings data to use for this experiment.

Data not available via input4MIPs

No data that is not input4MIPs-based is described specifically on this page. Please see the other data sub-sections for details of the forcings data to use for this experiment.