Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 1. Model evaluation in the present climate

This paper provides a first overview of the performance of state‐of‐the‐art global climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) in simulating climate extremes indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI), and compares it to that in the previous model generation (CMIP3). For the first time, the indices based on daily temperature and precipitation are calculated with a consistent methodology across multimodel simulations and four reanalysis data sets (ERA40, ERA‐Interim, NCEP/NCAR, and NCEP‐DOE) and are made available at the ETCCDI indices archive website. Our analyses show that the CMIP5 models are generally able to simulate…