Co-chairs: Thomas Fauchez (NASA GSFC), thomas.j.fauchez@nasa.gov and Linda Sohl (NASA GISS), les14@columbia.edu

What is CUISINES?

In the upcoming era of the James Webb Space Telescope, it becomes timely to focus community effort on benchmarking, comparing, and validating the performance of exoplanet models, both with respect to other models and to observations (when available).

This is the objective of the Climates Using Interactive Suites of Intercomparisons Nested for Exoplanet Studies (CUISINES) NExSS Science Working Group. The first intercomparison that happened within CUISINES is the TRAPPIST-1 Habitable Atmosphere Intercomparison (THAI). THAI compares the ExoCAM, LMD-G, ROCKE-3D and UM Global Climate Models (GCMs) on simulating TRAPPIST-1e. NExSS has hosted a successful THAI virtual workshop in September 2020 that brought together a community of 125 people and led to a peer-reviewed workshop report (https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01091). THAI protocol, data and results are available at THAI webpage.

With CUISINES we expect to expand THAI beyond only GCMs and rocky planets,  to perform intercomparison on any exoplanet model, from 3-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs) with or without interactive chemistry, Energy Balance Models (EBMs), 1D climate models, analytical models, and radiative transfer models from rocky to gas giant planets.

This project will identify and – where appropriate – smooth out differences between model predictions within the same model category (i.e. GCM vs GCM) or between categories (e.g. GCM vs. 1D climate models). It will also evaluate the model performances with comparisons to data (when available), as well as their computational efficiency. CUISINES data, multi-model outputs and scripts will all be made publicly available in a standardized format to guarantee easy reproducibility of the results.

To subscribe to the CUISINES email list please send an email to CUISINES-NExSS-join@lists.nasa.gov and include the word Join in the subject line or the body of the message.

The CUISINES datasets, protocols and results CUISINES are accessible here.

CUISINES presentation:

CUISINES is funded by SEEC, a NExSS team led by Ravi Kopparapu and Elisa Quintana (Co-PIs). You can find more information about SEEC here.