The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator coupled model (ACCESS-CM) has been developed at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), a partnership between CSIRO 1 and the Bureau of Meteorology. It is built by coupling the UK Met Office atmospheric unified model (UM), and other sub-models as required, to the ACCESS ocean model, which consists of the NOAA/GFDL 2 ocean model MOM4p1 and the LANL 3 sea-ice model CICE4.1, under the CERFACS 4 OASIS3.2-5 coupling framework. The primary goal of the ACCESS-CM development is to provide the Australian climate community with a new generation fully coupled climate model for climate research, and to participate in phase five of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP5). This paper describes the ACCESS-CM framework and components, and presents the control climates from two versions of the ACCESS-CM, ACCESS1.0 and AC-CESS1.3, together with some fields from the 20 th century historical experiments, as part of model evaluation. While sharing the same ocean sea-ice model (except different setups for a few parameters), ACCESS1.0 and ACCESS1.3 differ from each other in their atmospheric and land surface components: the former is configured with the UK Met Office HadGEM2 (r1.1) atmospheric physics and the Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme land surface model version 2, and the latter with atmospheric physics similar to the UK Met Office Global Atmosphere 1.0 including modifications performed at CAWCR and the CSIRO Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange land surface model version 1.8. The global average annual mean surface air temperature across the 500-year preindustrial control integrations show a warming drift of 0.35 °C in ACCESS1.0 and 0.04 °C in AC-CESS1.3. The overall skills of ACCESS-CM in simulating a set of key climatic fields both globally and over Australia significantly surpass those from the preceding CSIRO Mk3.5 model delivered to the previous coupled model inter-comparison. However, ACCESS-CM, like other CMIP5 models, has deficiencies in various aspects, and these are also discussed.

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The Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) is a coupled climate and earth system simulator being developed as a joint initiative of the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO in cooperation with the university community in Australia. The main aim of ACCESS is to develop a national approach to climate and weather prediction model development. Planning for ACCESS development commenced in 2005 and significant progress has been made subsequently. ACCESS-based numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems were implemented operationally by the Bureau in September 2009 and were marked by significantly increased forecast skill of close to one day for three-day forecasts over the previously operational systems. The fully-coupled ACCESS earth system model has been assembled and tested, and core runs have been completed and submitted for the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Significant progress has been made with ACCESS infrastructure including successful porting to both Solar and Vayu (National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)) machines and development of infrastructure to allow usage by university researchers. This paper provides a description of the NWP component of ACCESS and presents results from detailed verification of the system.

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