piControl Experiment Setup and Forcings Guidance

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

Experiment set up

The pre-industrial control simulation uses a specific set of forcings (see forcings). These should be applied on repeat for the entirety of the simulation.

You are free to start the time axis of your outputs at whatever year you like (e.g. starting at year 1, or 1850, or year 500). Simulations should be at least 400 years in length. Only one ensemble member is required.

Parent experiment

piControl branches from the piControl-spinup simulation (part of CMIP).

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

Forcings

Versions to use

The forcings relevant for this simulation are listed below. For each forcing, we provide the version(s), in the form of "source ID(s)", which should be used when running this simulation.

{
    "anthropogenic-emissions": ["CEDS-CMIP-2025-04-18", "CEDS-CMIP-2025-04-18-supplemental"],
    "biomass-burning-emissions": ["DRES-CMIP-BB4CMIP7-2-0"],
    "land-use": ["UofMD-landState-3-1-1"],
    "greenhouse-gas-concentrations": ["CR-CMIP-1-0-0"],
    "stratospheric-aerosol-forcing ": ["UOEXETER-CMIP-2-2-1"],
    "ozone": ["FZJ-CMIP-ozone-1-2"],
    "nitrogen-deposition": ["FZJ-CMIP-nitrogen-1-2"],
    "solar": ["SOLARIS-HEPPA-CMIP-4-6"],
    "aerosol-optical-properties": null,
    "population-density": ["PIK-CMIP-1-0-1"]
}

Notes

The following pages give further information on each forcing:

Beyond the information on these pages, please also note the following:

It can require some care to use the correct forcings for piControl. This is particularly true for stratospheric aerosol forcing, ozone and solar as the piControl values for these forcings aren't simply a repeat of 1850 values. Please read the guidance pages linked above carefully to ensure that you use the correct forcing values.

The aerosol optical properties based on the MACv2-SP parameterisation are not distrubuted via the ESGF.

Please see their specific guidance section for data access information.

Getting the data

The data is available on ESGF and searchable via metagrid, although this method of finding and downloading the data can involve a lot of clicking.

If you install esgpull, you can download all the data associated with the source IDs above with the script shown below. Note that this will download all the data associated with these source IDs, which is likely to be much more data than you actually need to run your model.

#!/bin/bash

EXPERIMENT_NAME="piControl"

esgpull add --track --tag ${EXPERIMENT_NAME} source_id:CEDS-CMIP-2025-04-18,CEDS-CMIP-2025-04-18-supplemental,DRES-CMIP-BB4CMIP7-2-0,UofMD-landState-3-1-1,CR-CMIP-1-0-0,UOEXETER-CMIP-2-2-1,FZJ-CMIP-ozone-1-2,FZJ-CMIP-nitrogen-1-2,SOLARIS-HEPPA-CMIP-4-6,PIK-CMIP-1-0-1
esgpull update --tag ${EXPERIMENT_NAME} --yes
esgpull download --tag ${EXPERIMENT_NAME}