A description of the FAMOUS (version XDBUA) climate model and control run
Abstract. FAMOUS is an ocean-atmosphere general circulation model of low resolution, capable of simulating well in excess of 100 years of model climate per wallclock day using current high performance computing facilities. It uses most of the same code as HadCM3, a widely used climate model of higher resolution and computational cost, and has been tuned to reproduce the same climate reasonably well. FAMOUS is useful for climate simulations where the computational cost makes the application of HadCM3 unfeasible, either because of the length of simulation or the size of the ensemble desired. We document a number of scientific and technical improvements to the original version of FAMOUS. These improvements include changes to the parameterisations of ozone and sea-ice which remove a significant cold bias from high northern latitudes and the upper troposphere, and the elimination of volume-averaged drifts in ocean tracers. There are also changes to the model infrastructure which facilitate paleoclimate simulations.