Solar-J is a high-fidelity solar radiative transfer Fortran 90 code. It has been developed for consistently calculating both the photolysis rates of important chemical species and the heating rates of the atmosphere and the Earth's surface. Its spectral range spans from 177 nm to 12 microns. It can be easily dropped in as a module in global climate–chemistry models.

The simulation of cloud is problematic for general circulation models. As clouds come in differing types, areal coverage, altitude and reflectivity, it is possible for a model to appear to perform well against a particular observational dataset through a compensation of errors. Here we evaluate a model's cloud simulation against a range of observational datasets, globally and across weather–climate timescales, in order to provide a comprehensive assessment.

The paper describes a version of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator that has been enabled to simulate the carbon cycle, which is designated ACCESS-ESM1. The model performance for pre-industrial conditions is assessed and land and ocean carbon fluxes are found to be simulated realistically.

Our work presents the evaluation of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-ESM1) over the historical period (1850–2005). The main focus is on climate and carbon related variables. Globally integrated land–atmosphere and ocean–atmosphere fluxes and flux patterns are well reproduced and show good agreement with most recent observations. This makes ACCESS-ESM1 a useful tool to explore the change in land and oceanic carbon uptake in the future.

We present a diagnostics, implemented in an Earth system model, which keeps track of the contribution of source categories (mainly emission sectors) to various concentrations (O₃ and HO_x). For the first time, it takes into account chemically competing effects, e.g., the competition between ozone precursors in the production of ozone. We show that the results are in-line with results from other tagging schemes and provide plausibility checks for OH and HO₂, which have not previously been tagged.

Carbon is a fundamental constituent of life and understanding its global cycle is a key challenge for the modelling of the Earth system. We use a variational method to estimate parameters and initial conditions for the carbon cycle model DALECv2 using multiple sources of observations. We develop a methodology that helps understanding the nature of the inverse problem and evaluating solution strategies, then we demonstrate the efficiency of the variational method in an experiment using real data.

The Polar SWIFT model is a fast scheme for calculating the chemistry of stratospheric ozone depletion in polar winter. It is intended for use in global climate models (GCMs) and Earth system models (ESMs) to enable the simulation of mutual interactions between the ozone layer and climate.

CoastalME is a generic modelling environment to simulate coastal landscape evolution on spatial scales of kms to tens of kms, over decadal to centennial timescales. The novelty is that it simulates coastal morphology evolution as a set of dynamically linked raster and geometrical objects. Geometrical objects are derived from the raster structure providing a library of coastal elements (e.g. shoreline) that are conventionally used for modelling coastal behaviour on the timescales of interest.

We present the Building blocks for Relevant Ice and Climate Knowledge (BRICK) model v0.2. BRICK is a model for hindcasting past and projecting future surface temperature and sea-level rise, resolving the sea-level contributions from glaciers and ice caps, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and thermal expansion. BRICK is specifically designed to support decision analyses through its transparency, and includes functionality to scale global sea-level estimates to regional projections.

Climate models have large grid cells due to the computational cost of running these complex models. Within grid cells like these, the land surface can vary dramatically impacting the exchange of water, carbon, and energy between the atmosphere and land. We use a technique to determine natural clusters of high-resolution soil texture within large grid cells and use them as inputs to our model. We find relatively low sensitivity to soil texture changes except in very dry regions and peatlands.

The CarbonTracker Data Assimilation Shell (CTDAS) is the new modular implementation of the CarbonTracker Europe (CTE) data assimilation system. We present and document CTDAS and demonstrate its ability to estimate global carbon sources and sinks. We present the latest CTE results including the distribution of the carbon sinks over the hemispheres and between the land biosphere and the oceans. We show the versatility of CTDAS with an overview of the wide range of other applications.

We enhance the urban climate model TEB to take into account for the variety of building use and human behaviour related to building energy consumption. This can improve urban climate simulations and is crucial for quantification of the impact of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures in urban areas (e.g. white roofs, insulation of buildings). An evaluation for Toulouse shows that the enhanced version of TEB captures well the spatio-temporal variability of building energy consumption.

A coordinated set of Arctic modeling experiments is proposed which explores how the Arctic responds to abrupt changes in external forcing by computing climate response functions (CRFs). We illustrate the approach in the context of a coarse-resolution model of the Arctic and conclude by encouraging other modeling groups to compute CRFs with their own models so that we might begin to document how robust they are to model formulation, resolution, and parameterization.

The diurnal hysteresis behaviour found between the net storage heat flux and net all-wave radiation has been captured in the Objective Hysteresis Model (OHM). To facilitate use, and enhance physical interpretations of the OHM coefficients, we develop the Analytical Objective Hysteresis Model (AnOHM) using an analytical solution of the one-dimensional advection–diffusion equation of coupled heat and liquid water transport in conjunction with the surface energy balance relationship.