BAMOS May 2026
10 Article
A week in Kyoto: reflections from the CMIP Community Workshop
Himadri Saini, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather( himadri. saini @ unimelb. edu. au)
Figure 1: The historic hall at the conference venue where the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, with participants taking photos on the stage. Credit: Himadri Saini
In early March, I had the opportunity to attend the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project( CMIP) Community Workshop in Kyoto, Japan. The workshop brought together an international community of climate scientists and focused on shaping the next generation of climate model experiments and deepening our understanding of Earth system processes.
What made this experience particularly memorable was not just the science but also the setting, as the workshop was held in the very building where the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997. Walking through that historic hall( Figure 1) was genuinely exhilarating and added a deeper sense of purpose to the discussions taking place.
The workshop spanned four days, with a mix of keynote talks, breakout sessions, poster presentations and informal discussions. It opened with an overview of CMIP7 and the development of the Assessment Fast Track – a set of high-priority experiments designed to support the next IPCC assessment. Four key scientific questions framed the discussions: how sea surface temperature patterns will evolve across latitudes, how dangerous weather systems may change, how the water – carbon – climate system will respond to human intervention, and what risks exist around tipping points. A notable shift for
CMIP7 is the increasing use of emission-driven simulations with fully interactive carbon cycles.
Day 1 also featured discussions on ScenarioMIP, where new scenario pathways were proposed to better reflect a wide range of plausible futures. These included high-emission scenarios aligned with current trajectories, medium scenarios representing the world under existing policies and low and overshoot pathways consistent with the Paris Agreement. There was also strong interest in extending simulations beyond 2100 to explore long-term climate responses.
One highlight of Day 2 was a talk on confronting Earth system model trends with observations. While there have been clear successes, important discrepancies remain, particularly in large-scale circulation trends and sea surface temperature patterns. And while higher-resolution models show promise, challenges such as signal-to-noise issues and uncertainties in forced responses still need to be better understood. Other presentations explored aerosol-driven cooling and its potential impact on large-scale circulation, including implications for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation( AMOC).
The day also featured palaeoclimate sessions, which highlighted the importance of past climate states for understanding sea