g. Guemas and Codron, 2011), thereby correcting a major bias of the IPSL-CM4 model version (e.g. Marti et al., 2010). The atmospheric horizontal resolution has thus been slightly increased from 96 × 71 grid points (3.75° × 2.5°) in IPSL-CM4 to 96 × 96 (1.9° × 3.8°) grid points in IPSL-CM5A-LR. The ORCHIDEE model (Krinner et al., 2005) is the land component selleck of the IPSL system. The INCA (INteraction between Chemistry and Aerosol, e.g. Szopa et al., 2012) model is used to simulate tropospheric greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations, while stratospheric ozone is modelled by REPROBUS (Reactive Processes Ruling the Ozone Budget in the Stratosphere, Lefèvre et al., 1994 and Lefèvre

et al., 1998). To conclude, the control simulation of the IPSL-CM4 (Marti et al., 2010) and IPSL-CM5A (Dufresne et al., 2013) models which contributed to the CX-5461 cell line CMIP3 and CMIP5 respectively (hereafter CM4_piCtrl and CM5_piCtrl respectively) differ more than just through the physical parameterizations of their oceanic component. In particular, they also differ in the version and resolution of the atmospheric model they use as well as the inclusion or not of the biogeochemical model. For this reason, it is difficult to compare these simulations directly, and several sensitivity simulations

were performed, in forced and coupled mode (Table 1), as described below. A series of experiments in forced mode are first performed, in order to quantify the respective influence of each of the parameterization changes of the oceanic component of the IPSL climate model from IPSL-CM4 to IPSL-CM5A. Table 1 (top) summarizes the five configurations (labelled F1_CMIP3, F2, F3, F4 and F5_CMIP5 respectively) under investigation here. In all these simulations, a sea surface salinity restoring term has been added, with a piston velocity of −166 mm/day as described in Griffies et al. (2009). All forced simulations described here have been integrated for 1500 years under the CORE climatological Methocarbamol forcing described in Griffies et al. (2009). The first

major evolution (implemented in F2) relies in the inclusion of a partial step formulation of bottom topography instead of a full step one (Barnier et al., 2006, Le Sommer et al., 2009 and Penduff et al., 2007). Indeed, as discussed in Pacanowski and Gnanadesikan (1998) for example, discretizing the bottom topography by steps often leads to a misrepresentation of a gradually sloping bottom and to large localised depth gradients associated with large localised vertical velocities. The partial step formulation improves the representation of bottom bathymetry in ocean models with coarse horizontal and vertical resolution. This development ensures consequently a more realistic flow of dense water mass and their movement associated to the friction along weak topographic slopes (e.g. Pacanowski and Gnanadesikan, 1998).