DICE update 16th April 2014

Dear DICE people,
    A few updates on where we are with the DICE intercomparison including requests for you to run some more simulations over the next few weeks.

1) Time is pressing on and I haven't managed to come up with any better large-scale forcing for the SCM than we already have so I've decided to leave the forcing unchanged from the first round.  So no need to rerun stage 1b

2) You will remember that several land models were producing seriously excessive daytime evaporation and these have now rerun stage 1a with revised surface parameters to produce more realistic surface fluxes.  Many thanks for that but, for those that haven't already done so, please could these groups also rerun stage 2 (coupled land and atmosphere models). 

3) Please could all LSMs rerun stage 3a (LSM forced by the SCM from stage 1b) because we have had two new SCMs in stage 1b since October. The new forcing files are SCM13 and SCM14 linked from http://appconv.metoffice.com/dice/dice_files/dice_stage3forcing.html

4) the new stage1a simulations from (2) mean we now have new datasets of surface fluxes with which to drive the SCMs in stage 3b.  We are still awaiting a couple of these but these will all appear linked from the bottom of http://appconv.metoffice.com/dice/dice_files/dice_stage3forcing.html - note that files lsm01 to lsm12 are the same as before while the rest are new.  I will email again (hopefully next week!) when we have the complete set and could all SCM groups rerun their models for these new LSM forcing datasets in stage3b.

So, hoping that you are all still set-up to turn the handle on these simulations fairly easily, we'd like to ask that you email us back the results ideally by the end of April or as early as possible in May.  The GEWEX meeting is in July so that doesn't leave long to analyse the results, hopefully in more depth than at the October workshop.  We also suggested at that workshop that others in the group might like to get hold of the model data in order to test their own ideas on coupling sensitivity, etc so please let me know if you would be interested in doing that.

   Many thanks again for all your patience and contributions,
     Adrian and Martin

PS: the DICE email list is currently broken so to create this email list I've pasted everyone's address in by hand from the email list website!  Apologies for any errors and I'll send it again once the email list is working again.  I'll also put a copy on the updates part of the webpage, http://appconv.metoffice.com/dice/dice.html