The climate prediction .net BBC climate change experiment: design of the coupled model ensemble

Perturbed physics experiments are among the most comprehensive ways to address uncertainty in climate change forecasts. In these experiments, parameters and parametrizations in atmosphere–ocean general circulation models are perturbed across ranges of uncertainty, and results are compared with observations. In this paper, we describe the largest perturbed physics climate experiment conducted to date, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) climate change experiment, in which the physics of the atmosphere and ocean are changed, and run in conjunction with a forcing ensemble designed to represent uncertainty in past and future forcings, under the A1B Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) climate change scenario.