An Orientation for New Users

Welcome to the PCMDI website.

Information about PCMDI is organized according to sections that appear at the top of all our web pages. Proceeding from left to right, these sections are: About, IPCC Model Output, Projects, Software, Publications, and Links. By placing your mouse cursor over a section, you will see pull-down menus with links to different sub-section topics.

For example...

The About section includes an introduction to PCMDI, a listing of our staff, and location/contact information.

The IPCC Model Output section allows registered users to access data from several different global climate models that are simulating the present climate, the historical climate of the 20th century, and/or 21st/22nd-century climates that may occur in response to various scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions. These climate simulations are being run at the request of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which will publish selected results of related diagnostic sub-projects in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2006.

The Projects section elaborates ongoing PCMDI scientific initiatives. These include our coordination of model intercomparisons such as AMIP, CMIP, and SMIP, our maintenance of the CAPT model parameterization testbed, and our investigation of statistical methods for detection/attribution of climate change.

The Software section documents the PCMDI-maintained Climate Data Analsysis Tools (CDAT) for computation/visualization and the Climate Model Output Rewriter (CMOR) for standardized data formatting, and supplies software downloads and other support services.

The Publications section cites PCMDI reports and peer-reviewed papers, and provides a number of full-text documents as well.

Finally, the Links section lists many other websites that pertain to the study of different aspects of the climate system.

For a still more detailed view of our website's structure, please refer to the site map.