Nearly two dozen Livermore scientists conduct PCMDI research in a wide range of areas. For example, they have made key contributions to the assessment reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which planners and policy makers use to prepare for and respond to future climate change. In recognition of its work to build and disseminate knowledge of human-induced climate change, IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

In addition, PCMDI helped establish and now coordinates an ongoing international effort that facilitates the systematic evaluation of climate models and addresses the question of future climate change. During the third phase of this project, PCMDI and its partners enabled hundreds of researchers worldwide to subject models to unprecedented scrutiny and analysis. For its work, PCMDI was recognized by IPCC in its fourth assessment report, and the program received a special award from the American Meteorological Society.

Today, PCMDI scientists are helping to coordinate an even more ambitious follow-on project, phase five of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). CMIP5 calls for a set of coordinated climate model experiments agreed to by the modelling group representatives in the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling. These experiments build on previous CMIP phases but include a more comprehensive set of simulations to enable model evaluation. The suite of simulations is designed to help researchers diagnose the processes responsible for differences in model projections of climate change and should allow them to better understand the uncertainty in the various projections. The results from CMIP5 will most likely provide the basis for much of the new climate science evaluated in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, planned for publication in late 2013.

For more details, see the Science and Technology Review article Seeking Clues to Climate Change: Computer models provide insights to Earth's climate future.