Assessment of CanESM5 decadal hindcasts

The Canadian Earth System Model version 5 (CanESM5), recently developed at Environment and Climate Change Canada's Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma), is contributing to the Decadal Climate Prediction Project (DCPP) and other components of phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). This presentation will describe evaluations of CanESM5 decadal hindcasts against observational benchmarks and uninitialized simulations, as well as comparisons with hindcasts from CCCma's CanCM4 model that contributed to CMIP5. Evaluation criteria include standard measures of potential predictability and actual skill for global and regional climate quantities. A novel approach to assess the effect of forecast initialization on prediction skill will also be discussed.