Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESM LENS)

Description

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble Numerical Simulation (LENS) dataset includes a 40-member ensemble of climate simulations for the period 1920-2100 using historical data (1920-2005) or assuming the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas concentration scenario (2006-2100), as well as longer control runs based on pre-industrial conditions. The data comprise both surface (2D) and volumetric (3D) variables in the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice domains. The total data volume of the original dataset is ~500TB, which has traditionally been stored as ~150,000 individual CF/NetCDF files on disk or magnetic tape made available through the NCAR Climate Data Gateway for download or via web services. NCAR has copied a subset (currently ~70 TB) of CESM LENS data to Amazon S3 as part of the AWS Public Datasets Program. To optimize for large-scale analytics we have represented the data as ~275 Zarr stores format accessible through the Python Xarray library. Each Zarr store contains a single physical variable for a given model run type and temporal frequency (monthly, daily, 6-hourly).

Update Frequency

Rare. The LENS experiment is complete, but we may occasionally copy additional fields from NCAR to AWS, or fix problems discovered in the AWS copy.

License

https://www.ucar.edu/terms-of-use/data

Documentation

https://doi.org/10.26024/wt24-5j82

Managed By

See all datasets managed by National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Contact

rdahelp@ucar.edu

How to Cite

Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESM LENS) was accessed on DATE from https://registry.opendata.aws/ncar-cesm-lens.

Usage Examples

Tutorials

• Analyzing large climate model ensembles in the cloud by Joe Hamman, NCAR
  

Tools & Applications

• Jupyter Notebook and other documentation and tools for CESM LENS on AWS by NCAR Science at Scale team
  
• Rendered (static) version of Jupyter Notebook by Anderson Banihirwe, NCAR
  
• Urban Climate Explorer by Zhonghua Zheng
  

Publications

• The Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble Project: A Community Resource for Studying Climate Change in the Presence of Internal Climate Variability by Kay et al. (2015), Bull. AMS, 96, 1333-1349