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PCMDI was established in 1989 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), located in the San Francisco Bay area, in California. Participants in PCMDI include research scientists and computer scientists at LLNL, other research laboratories, and universities. PCMDI is funded by the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) Program Area of the United States's Department of Energy's Earth and Environmental Systems Modeling (EESM) Program. The EESM is a component of the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) which is within the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Program Office of the United States's Department of Energy's Office of Science.
The PCMDI mission is to develop advanced methods and tools for the diagnosis and intercomparison and improvement of Global Climate Models (GCMs). The need for innovative analysis of GCM simulations is apparent, as increasingly more complex models are developed. At the same time, disagreements among these simulations relative to observations and in their predictions of climate change remain significant and incompletely understood. Through PCMDI's efforts, GCMs will advance so that they are capable of addressing the important questions that policy makers and society have about global climate change.
PCMDI's mission demands that we work on both scientific projects and infrastructural tasks. Our current scientific projects focus on developing perfomance metrics for GCMs, identifying robust Cloud Feedbacks in observations and models, devising robust statistical methods for climate-change detection/attribution, and understanding GCM errors through a model parameterization testbed. Examples of ongoing infrastructural tasks include the development of software for data management, visualization, and computation; the assembly/organization of observational data sets for model validation; and the consistent documentation of climate model features. Details of PCMDI's work are described in our publications and research highlights.
We now also are applying our collective expertise to support modeling studies initiated by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Notably, we are currently providing leadership in managing the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6 (CMIP6). Among PCMDI's role in CMIP6 is responsibility for leading the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) which stores and distributes terrascale data sets from multiple coupled ocean-atmosphere global climate model simulations. Extensive analysis of these simulations by members of the international climate community provided an important scientific basis for the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change, which was published in 2021.
