NOAA's Ocean Climate Change Web Portal CMIP6

This is an experimetal web-tool designed to explore changes projected in the oceans by coupled climate models' CMIP6 experiments (historical, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0).

Variables:

Current variables available are divided in two categories : the physical atmospheric, and the physical oceanic variables.
The physical atmospheric variables are near-surface air temperature, and precipitation.
The physical oceanic variables are sea surface temperature, and sea surface salinity.

All the variables are interpolated to a 1-degree by 1-degree grid to facilitate inter-comparison. A bilinear interpolation is used for the atmospheric variables, and a distance-weighted average method is used for the oceanic variables.

Basics Options:

Users can select individual model or an average of all models. There are also choices to be made for season, historical period, future projection time period, and region. A 4-panel plot is created based on the user choices. The upper left panel shows the historical climate (for the period chosen by the user). The upper right shows the change in climate between the historical and the future projection (SSP5-8.5 experiment). The lower left panel shows the historical climate variability (for the metric chosen by the user).  Lastly, the lower right panel shows the change in variability between the historical and the future projection.

Statistic Options:

4 different options are available for statistics: anomaly, standard anomaly (average of historical standard deviation), standard anomaly (ensemble standard deviation), and ensemble spread of future change.

Anomaly

If the user selects "Anomaly" as the statistic: The climate change panel (upper right) shows the difference between the future projection and the historical climate. The climate variability panel (lower left) shows the inter-annual (de-trended) standard deviation over the historical period (for a single model or averaged across models).  The change in variability (lower right panel) shows the ratio between the inter-annual de-trended variance for future projection and the inter-annual de-trended variance for historical period. 

Standard Anomaly (average historical)

If the user selects "Standard Anomaly (average historical)" as the statistic: The climate change panel (upper right) shows the standardized differences between the future projection and the historical climate. The differences are normalized by the de-trended inter-annual standard deviation over the historical period (for a single model or averaged across models).  The two bottom panels are the same as when "anomaly" is selected.

Standard Anomaly (ensemble spread)

If "standard anomaly (ensemble spread)" is chosen as the statistic: The differences are normalized by the historical standard deviation across all models.  The lower left panel shows the historical standard deviation across all models. The lower right panel shows the ratio between the variance of the ensemble spread for future projection and the variance of the ensemble spread for historical period.

Ensemble Spread of Future Change

If "ensemble spread of future change" is chosen as the statistic: The climate change panel (upper right) shows the differences between the future projection and the historical climate. The lower left panel shows the ensemble standard deviation (spread) of the future projection and the lower right panel shows the ratio of the mean change, divided by the ensemble spread of the change.

More Information

More information on CMIP6 can be found here:

This page is maintained by Jamie Scott