This study mainly introduces the development of the Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Model: Grid-point Version 2 (FGOALS-g2) and the preliminary evaluations of its performances based on re- sults from the pre-industrial control run and four members of historical runs according to the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) experiment design. The results suggest that many obvi- ous improvements have been achieved by the FGOALS-g2 compared with the previous version, FGOALS-gl, including its climatological mean states, climate variability, and 20th century surface temperature evolution. For example, FGOALS-g2 better simulates the frequency of tropical land precipitation, East Asian Monsoon precipitation and its seasonal cycle, MJO and ENSO, which are closely related to the updated cumulus parameterization scheme, as well as the alleviation of uncertainties in some key parameters in shallow and deep convection schemes, cloud fraction, cloud macro/microphysical processes and the boundary layer scheme in its atmospheric model. The annual cycle of sea surface temperature along the equator in the Pacific is significantly improved in the new version. The sea ice salinity simulation is one of the unique characteristics of FGOALS-g2, although it is somehow inconsistent with empirical observations in the Antarctic.
The Grid-point Atmospheric Model of IAP LASG version 2 (GAMIL2) has been developed through upgrading the deep convection parameterization, cumulus cloud fraction and two-moment cloud microphys- ical scheme, as well as changing some of the large uncertain parameters. In this paper, its performance is evaluated, and the results suggest that there are some significant improvements in GAMIL2 compared to the previous version GAMIL1, for example, the components of the energy budget at the top of atmosphere (TOA) and surface; the geographic distribution of shortwave cloud radiative forcing (SWCF); the ratio of stratiform versus total rainfall; the response of atmospheric circulation to the tropical ocean; and the east- ward propagation and spatiotemporal structures of the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO). Furthermore, the indirect aerosols effect (IAE) is -0.94 W m-2, within the range of 0 to -2 W m-2 given by the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007). The influence of uncertain parameters on the MJO and radiation fluxes is also discussed.