/ CMIP Phases / CMIP Phase 7 (CMIP7)

CMIP Phase 7 (CMIP7)

The CMIP7 design builds on lessons learned from CMIP6 and extensive input from the climate modelling community through surveys, consultations, and ongoing feedback. It introduces changes to the protocol and organisational framework that respond to community priorities, including reducing the burden of running simulations and delivering data, enabling more agile and community-driven Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs), and strengthening support for research, climate assessment, and climate services. Through these changes, CMIP7 aims to maintain the breadth and scientific value of CMIP activities while creating a more flexible and sustainable framework for participation. Its goals are to: (1) sustain the diverse multi-scale research effort fostered through CMIP6; (2) support more flexible and episodic participation in coordinated experiments and intercomparisons; and (3) enable ongoing engagement through continuous, responsive community support.

CMIP7 is introduced in the CMIP7 Overview Paper (Dunne et al., 2025).

Figure is available on Zenodo for community use (click on figure to access).

CMIP7 Research Questions

The CMIP Panel have collated four Fundamental Research Questions motivating Coupled Model intercomparison, which the data from CMIP7 will help to address substantially. Full descriptions of the science questions can be found in the CMIP7 Overview Paper (Dunne et al., 2025).

  1. Patterns of sea surface change: How will tropical ocean temperature patterns co-evolve with those at higher latitudes?
  2. Changing weather: How will dangerous weather patterns evolve?
  3. Water-carbon-climate nexus: How will Earth respond to human efforts to manage the carbon cycle?
  4. Tipping Points: What are the risks of triggering irreversible changes across possible climate trajectories?

The DECK

As in CMIP6, running the Diagnostic, Evaluation and Characterization of Klima (DECK) will remain the “entry card” for CMIP, including the Assessment Fast Track. Community feedback on potential changes to the DECK have been received by the Panel. At their meeting in March 2024, the WGCM endorsed the CMIP Panel recommendation to include the following experiments marked in bold in the DECK:

  • amip
  • abrupt4xCO2
  • piControl (and esm-piControl for ESMs)
  • 1pctCO2 
  • historical
  • esm-hist (for ESMs only) 
  • piClim-control 
  • piClim-anthro 
  • piClim-4xCO2 

The CMIP Panel confirmed their decision to ensure emissions-driven experiments are well proven and tested before inclusion as an ESM-DECK, and to consider proposals for inclusion of LMIP and OMIP in the DECK, in the future.

The Community MIPs

  • 42 MIPs have registered and can be found on the CMIP website.
  • The CMIP Panel will not be endorsing MIPs but have provided best practice guidance.
  • Requests for Panel feedback and support from the CMIP IPO can be submitted through the registration form.
  • The Panel wants to encourage MIPs to not re-run CMIP6 experiments with new models, and to collaborate across MIPs to identify and reduce any potential duplication, and with consideration of their carbon footprint.
  • If MIPs have information/news they would like to share with CMIP community, then email the CMIP IPO.

Guidance for MIPs contributing to CMIP7 is available in the CMIP7 guidance pages.

Guidance for MIPs in CMIP7

CMIP7 Assessment Fast Track (CMIP7 AFT)

The newly introduced Assessment Fast Track is a subset of CMIP7 experiments drawn from the community MIPs intended to support upcoming policy assessments and downstream climate services applications, such as regional downscaling (CORDEX), impacts modelling (ISIMIP), ice sheet modelling (ISMIP) and climate services (VIACS). This includes near-term policy-relevant scenarios, model characterisation experiments, attribution studies, and process understanding experiments designed to isolate key feedbacks and uncertainties in climate projections.

CMIP7 scenarios

In a publication in Geoscientific Model Development (van Vuuren et al., 2026), the ScenarioMIP team describes a new set of global emissions scenarios that will form the basis for climate research as part of the ongoing phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project – CMIP7.

Two important changes from the CMIP6 scenarios are that, during the 21st century, the highest global emissions scenario is now lower than in previous scenario sets, while the preliminary estimate of global temperature change associated with the lowest emissions scenario no longer remains below 1.5°C. The new high-end scenario still leads to substantial climate change, and uncertainties in the climate system mean that global warming could still exceed 4°C by 2100.

Read our CMIP7 scenario explainer
Read CMIP7 scenarios paper

Guidance and data access

The CMIP Panel and WIP, together with key stakeholders, are compiling guidance for modelling centres, MIPs, ESGF nodes, and data users for the production, publishing, and use of CMIP7 data. This will be the key resource throughout CMIP7 for guidance and will be updated as needed.

You can access the data directly from the guidance pages.

CMIP7 guidance

When to expect CMIP7 data?

Modelling centres have provided indications of when they plan to start running the piControl, historical, and scenario simulations for CMIP7, and when they expect to start publishing their data. This information is summarised in the table below (if you are having issues viewing the table, click here). The information will be updated periodically – please note the column ‘Last updated’ which indicates how recently a modelling centre updated their information.

Some centres have provided the information per individual model, others have not.

Key Publications

Below are a number of key publications outlining the scientific and technical design of CMIP7. There are also two special issues (‘CMIP7 scientific objectives, experimental design, and organization‘ and ‘Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 7 (CMIP7) forcings and inputs – development, documentation, and evaluation‘) which feature additional papers on MIPs and forcing datasets.

CMIP experimental design, vision, and scenarios

The Rapid Evaluation Framework (REF), model evaluation, and benchmarking

Forcings

CMIP Infrastructure and Data Request

Frequently Asked Questions

The following questions have been raised during events or via our Question Submission form. If you have a question, please submit it by clicking the button below. If you notice that an answer is out of date, please contact the CMIP IPO.

Submit a new question

We continue to welcome all feedback from across the community. To stay up to date with the latest developments, please bookmark this page and join our mailing lists here to hear about the latest news and events.

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