Updates for data users¶

To sign up for the CMIP Community News mailing list please visit https://wcrp-cmip.org/cmip-mailing-lists/.

10 September 2026¶

First CMIP7 results now available in the REF¶

Following our announcement last week that the first CMIP7 results are now available on ESGF, we are pleased to let you know that the Rapid Evaluation Framework (REF) is now displaying diagnostics from the CMIP7 data. These results can be accessed from the REF dashboard and the associated API. Guidance on accessing the REF results is available here.

Climate-REF (Rapid Evaluation Framework) provides a consistent, reproducible platform for evaluating climate model outputs against reference datasets, visualising results, and comparing performance across models and versions.

This interface exposes pre-computed diagnostics, execution groups, and visualisations produced by 4 diagnostic providers (ESMValTool, ILAMB/IOMB and PMP). The Climate-REF can also be run locally or deployed on your own infrastructure if you wish to evaluate data not yet published on ESGF; see the documentation for more information.

There is only limited CMIP7 data available at the moment and the results are therefore considered preliminary. CMIP Panel considers a robust threshold of minimum data to be at least three modelling centre simulations, and these should be from at least three individual models, with at least one ensemble member each. The REF will display a warning until there are CMIP7 results from over 20 individual modelling centres and individual models.

The results presented here cover CMIP6 and CMIP7 datasets. The two are always charted separately, because the ensembles are not directly comparable. We have some example figures available in the Data Explorer or you can browse the full Diagnostic Catalog.

If you have ideas for expansion of the REF, please use the our Discussion Board facility.

4 September 2026¶

First CMIP7 data is now available!¶

We’re pleased to announce that the first CMIP7 datasets are now available on ESGF!

At the time of sending this email there is data published from five models across three modelling centres and seven experiments. We expect data to continue to be published over the coming months.

To help users access and use the data, we have compiled guidance on access routes data formats in the CMIP7 Guidance website. We encourage all users to read through this information, as ESGF has undergone a number of updates since CMIP6.