PAPER 16.11 Earth System modelling progress and strategy

Here we define Earth System Modelling (ESM) as modelling of large scale environmental change (for example in climate and biogeochemical cycles), that goes beyond the ‘traditional ’ physcial processes controlling atmosphere, ocean and sea ice. ESM is an essential tool in assessing future environmental change and informing climate change mitigation and adaptation decisions. For many years the Met Office has played a leading role in international ESM science, as evidenced for example by contributions to the successive assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A key factor in these continuing contributions has been the development of successive generations of earth system models that are at the forefront in both the comprehensiveness of their formulation and the quality of their simulation of present and past climate. Broadly these models have been developed on a 5 t