PMIP 2 Workshop 1

Dear PMIP 2 Community,

We would like to invite you to attend the international PMIP 2 workshop to be held in Giens, France from 3 to 8 April 2005. The workshop will mainly focus on the results of the new coupled atmosphere-ocean and atmosphere-ocean-vegetation model simulations for the Last Glacial Maximum and mid-Holocene, and the evaluation of these results using new and existing data syntheses. It will also measure the progress for the new foci of PMIP2 - the early Holocene, last glacial inception, and water hosing experiments. We hope the workshop will allow the community to prepare summaries of PMIP 2 results in a timely fashion to contribute to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

The second phase of PMIP was launched in Autumn 2003 (Harrison et al., EOS, 2002). The major goals of PMIP 2 are to determine the ability of state-of-the-art climate models to reproduce climate states that are different from those of today and to increase our understanding of climate change. PMIP 2 results are expected to contribute in a major way to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The extensive model-model and model-data comparisons for the LGM and mid-Holocene that are planned in PMIP 2 will provide another metric for constraining climate sensitivities of the models included in AR4 assessment of future change.

PMIP 2 will also consider time periods that were not a focus of the first phase of the project, specifically the Early Holocene (when the insolation forcing was even larger than during the mid-Holocene) and the last glacial inception (to better constrain the major feedbacks that are needed to amplify insolation forcing and bring the system from a warm interglacial state to a cold glacial state). PMIP2 will collaborate with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project on a series of "water-hosing", in an attempt to improve our understanding of the sensitivity of the thermohaline circulation to fresh water fluxes. Details on PMIP 2 goals and protocol can be found on the PMIP 2 web site (http://pmip2.lsce.ipsl.fr/).

The meeting will provide an opportunity to:

• Discuss the results of coupled simulations of the mid-Holocene and LGM, specifically addressing issues of climate sensitivity, the role of ocean, land-surface and sea-ice feedbacks, and interannual to multi-decadal variability.
• Present new data syntheses addressing both changes in mean climate and in short-term climate variability for these two time periods.
• Present model-data comparisons that are currently being made, as well as defining additional model-data intercomparisons on key aspects of the simulations.
• Prepare the boundary conditions and experimental protocol for planned simulations of the Early Holocene and last glacial inception.
• Extract and synthesize key results and diagnostics from the ongoing work that are relevant for future climate change and that will help us evaluate models used for IPCC-AR4 scenarios.

The workshop will be organized as a series of keynote lectures, short presentations and posters, and working groups on specific subjects. The working groups will be charged with the preparation of syntheses and summaries of the key results, so that these results can be rapidly submitted for publication in the peer-reviewed literature.

More information on the meeting venue and registration will be forthcoming and posted on the PMIP 2 web site: http://pmip2.lsce.ipsl.fr/.

We hope to see you in Giens for a stimulating and productive meeting.

PMIP 2 Steering Committee

Pascale Braconnot, Sandy Harrison, Chris Hewitt, Sylvie Joussaume, Bette Otto-Bliesner, Gilles Ramstein, Ronald Stouffer, Karl Taylor, and Paul Valdes