iLOVECLIM ESM

Presentation

The iLOVECLIM Earth system model is a tool to research past, present and future changes in the Earth system, focusing on time scales of centuries to hundreds of thousands of years. The simulated Earth system consists of the ocean, sea-ice, atmosphere, vegetation, ice sheets, terrestrial and marine carbon cycle, icebergs and permafrost. Furthermore, it includes a number of so-called tracers or proxy-forward models including the isotopes of oxygen, water and carbon and the natural radionuclide ratio of protactinium and thorium.

iLOVECLIM is a so-called Earth system Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs). This means that the complexity of the description of the included processes and the model resolution is in between that was is typically found in conceptual models and fully coupled general circulation models (GCMs). The resulting reduction in computational costs of iLOVECLIM compared to GCMs allows us to reach our overall scientific goals:

  1. explore the complex behavior of the Earth system up to time scales of hundreds of thousands of years
  2. perform extensive sensitivity analysis
  3. research the integrated multi-component Earth system response