A circulation-based performance atlas of the CMIP5 and 6 models for regional climate studies in the northern hemisphere

This dataset contains 6-hourly instantaneous categorial data of the Lamb circulation types (Lamb 1972) on a 2.5 degrees longitude-latitude grid covering the northern hemisphere extratropics between 30ºN and 70ºN for the period 1979-2005. These "Lamb catalogues" were calculated for the historical experiments of 61 distinct GCMs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 and 6 and for two distinct reanalyses (ERA-Interim and JRA-55). For 13 out of 56 GCMs, 72 additional runs are provided to explore the role of internal model variability. For more information, please refer to the following article:

Brands, S. (2021): A circulation-based performance atlas of the CMIP5 and 6 models for regional climate studies in the northern hemisphere. Geoscientific Model Development, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2020-418

or contact: [e-mail]

Reference: Lamb, H.: British Isles Weather types and a register of daily sequence of circulation patterns, 1861-1971, Geophysical Memoir, 116, 85pp., HMSO, 1972.

CAUTION: When unpacked, this dataset occupies 110 GB of your local disk space.

Update information:

Version 2 of this archive includes the model_source_attributes.txt file containing the "source" attributes stored in the netCDF files obtained from ESGF. This attribute provides details about the individual component models within the coupled model configurations used in CMIP5 and 6.

Version 3 of this archive includes 10 new GCMs, two additional runs for CNRM-CM6-1 and an updated version of model_source_attributes.txt

Version 3.1 includes README.txt, which explains the content of the files located in the tar.gz file.

Version 4 further includes Lamb Weather Type catalogues for the ERA5 reanalysis and 4 additional GCMs. All files have been compressed individually.  The file is depreciated and no longer updated. It is replaced by the Python function available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4555367. This function contains an exhaustive metadata archive of the 60 GCMs considered here.

Version 4.1 The LWT catalogue for CMCC-CM2-HR4 is included for consistency with the respective Southern Hemisphere dataset published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7612987