The simulations
Historical simulations cover the 1979-2008 period. Future simulations cover the 2038-2068 (the additional first year is thought to be a spin up for land since we use the same initial conditions) Coupled simulations are still running
Forcing
The SST/sea-ice forcing for historical forcing is coming from the recently developed HadISST2.1.1 dataset (a pentad based dataset, with 0.25x0.25 res. for SSTs and 1x1 res. for sea ice concentration). Radiative forcing is following the historical protocol from CMIP5. Unfortunately, we found that due to a bug in the radiation code the model is ignoring the 11-year solar cycle.
Initial conditions are taken from ERA-INTERIM at midnight of 01-01-1979. SSTs for future simulation are built in a bit complicated way: long story short, we used the high resolution spatial and temporal variability from the HadISST 2.1.1 and the mean change and trends from ensemble mean EC-Earth simulation from CMIP5.
Tuning
As a general note, such GCMs are usually tuned to reach the right fluxes at TOA and surface: however, since SPHINX involved different experiments at different resolution, we opted for tuning only the standard version (T255L91). This has been done in order to allow a comparison among the different experiments. As a consequence, the high resolution T1279L91 has an average surface flux that is underestimated by about 0.5-0.7 W/m^2.