CMIP ─ Coupled Model Intercomparison Project

The modelling of the Earth’s climate is executed by a range of institutes all over the globe. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) coordinates these efforts to improve the overall quality and reliability of the model outputs with the objective to understand past, present and future climate changes. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) launched the CMIP modelling project in 1995 and since then it has grown from a scientific research initiative to become a global enterprise: more than 50 modelling centres around the world have participated in the sixth phase of CMIP, CMIP6, which has highly contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. This collaborative structure has now expanded to a point where coordination of its elements requires dedicated secretariat support resulting in the establishment of the CMIP International Project Office (CMIP-IPO), hosted by the European Space Agency (ESA) at its European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT).