Overview of the CMIP6 historical experiment datasets with the climate system model CAS FGOALS-f3-L

The 3-member historical simulations by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Flexible Global Ocean–Atmosphere–Land System model, version f3-L (CAS FGOALS-f3-L), which contribute to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), are described in this study. The details of the CAS FGOALS-f3-L model, experiments settings and output datasets are briefly introduced. The datasets include monthly and daily outputs from the atmospheric, oceanic, land and sea ice component models of CAS FGOALS-f3-L, and all these data have been published online in the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF, https://esgf-nodes.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/). The three ensembles, which are initialized from the 600th, 650th, and 700th model year of the preindustrial experiment (piControl) and forced by the same historical forcing provided by CMIP6 from 1850 to 2014. The performance of the coupled model is validated in comparison with some latest observed atmospheric and oceanic datasets. It is shown that the CAS FGOALS-f3-L is able to reproduce the main features of the modern climate, including the climatology of air surface temperature and precipitation, the long-term changes in global mean surface air temperature, ocean heat content and sea surface steric height, and the horizontal and vertical distribution of temperature in the ocean and atmosphere. Meanwhile, there are still some obvious biases in the historical simulations like other state-of-the-art coupled general circulation models (GCMs), which are also illustrated. This paper can help the users to better understand the advantages and biases of the model and the datasets.