Global emissions pathways under different socioeconomic scenarios for use in CMIP6: a dataset of harmonized emissions trajectories through the end of the century

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Abstract. We present a suite of nine scenarios of future emissions trajectories of anthropogenic sources, a key deliverable of the ScenarioMIP experiment within CMIP6. Integrated assessment model results for 14 different emissions species and 13 emissions sectors are provided for each scenario with consistent transitions from the historical data used in CMIP6 to future trajectories using automated harmonization before being downscaled to provide higher emissions source spatial detail. We find that the scenarios span a wide range of end-of-century radiative forcing values, thus making this set of scenarios ideal for exploring a variety of warming pathways. The set of scenarios is bounded on the low end by a 1.9 W m−2 scenario, ideal for analyzing a world with end-of-century temperatures well below 2 ∘C, and on the high end by a 8.5 W m−2 scenario, resulting in an increase in warming of nearly 5 ∘C over pre-industrial levels. Between these two extremes, scenarios are provided such that differences between forcing outcomes provide statistically significant regional temperature outcomes to maximize their usefulness for downstream experiments within CMIP6. A wide range of scenario data products are provided for the CMIP6 scientific community including global, regional, and gridded emissions datasets.

Related collections

Most cited references 31

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

An Overview of CMIP5 and the Experiment Design

Karl E. Taylor, Ronald J Stouffer, Gerald Meehl (2012)

The fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) will produce a state-of-the- art multimodel dataset designed to advance our knowledge of climate variability and climate change. Researchers worldwide are analyzing the model output and will produce results likely to underlie the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Unprecedented in scale and attracting interest from all major climate modeling groups, CMIP5 includes “long term” simulations of twentieth-century climate and projections for the twenty-first century and beyond. Conventional atmosphere–ocean global climate models and Earth system models of intermediate complexity are for the first time being joined by more recently developed Earth system models under an experiment design that allows both types of models to be compared to observations on an equal footing. Besides the longterm experiments, CMIP5 calls for an entirely new suite of “near term” simulations focusing on recent decades and the future to year 2035. These “decadal predictions” are initialized based on observations and will be used to explore the predictability of climate and to assess the forecast system's predictive skill. The CMIP5 experiment design also allows for participation of stand-alone atmospheric models and includes a variety of idealized experiments that will improve understanding of the range of model responses found in the more complex and realistic simulations. An exceptionally comprehensive set of model output is being collected and made freely available to researchers through an integrated but distributed data archive. For researchers unfamiliar with climate models, the limitations of the models and experiment design are described.