CanSIPS Historical Forecasts

CanSIPS historical forecasts or hindcasts consist of output from two Environment Canada climate simulation and forecast models, CanCM3 and CanCM4, with ensembles of 10 forecast runs from each model in order to address the large uncertainties inherent in climate forecasts and to enable the probabilities of different forecast outcomes to be quantified. Hindcasts are initialized from the start of each month from January 1979 to December 2010, and have a duration of 12 months. Data consist of daily and monthly mean values for an array of atmospheric, surface, sea ice and ocean variables and are regridded onto a 2.5 degree grid (1 degree for ocean data) as described in ftp://dapp2p.cccma.ec.gc.ca/pub/goapp/CHFP/CHFP2_Data_Guide_v1.pdf, and is provided in NetCDF format. A subset of variables relating to sea ice, snow and ocean surface temperature is also provided on the original model grid.