Large lakes in climate models: A Great Lakes case study on the usability of CMIP5

Large lakes have an impact on regional weather. In addition, they can be both sensitive to and influence regional climate changes. In the climate models that are used to investigate future climate changes, lakes are greatly simplified and sometimes absent. At the regional scale, this can have strong implications for the quality of the model information about the future. Through our work with climate information users in the Laurentian Great Lakes region, we have found that basic credibility of the information requires the underlying climate models simulate lake-atmosphere-land interactions. We are not aware of efforts within the scientific community to make known how individual large lakes are represented in models and how those representations translate to the quality of the data for particular regions. We share our framework for identifying how the Laurentian Great Lakes are represented in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) version 5 climate models. We found that most CMIP5 models do not simulate the Great Lakes in a way that captures their impact on the regional climate, which is a credibility issue for their projections. We provide a perspective on the usability of CMIP5 for practitioners in the Great Lakes region and offer recommendations for alternative options. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of International Association for Great Lakes Research.