Observations are essential for the development and evaluation of climate models. Satellite and in-situ measurements as well as reanalysis products provide crucial resources for these purposes. Over the last two decades, the climate modeling community has become adept at developing model intercomparison projects (MIPs) that provide the basis for more systematic comparisons of climate models under common experimental conditions. A prominent example among these is the coupled MIP (CMIP). Due to its growing importance in providing input to the IPCC, the framework for CMIP, now planning CMIP6, has expanded to include a very comprehensive and precise set of experimental protocols, with an advanced data archive and dissemination system. While the number, types and sophistication of observations over the same time period have kept pace, their systematic application to the evaluation of climate models has yet to be fully exploited due to a lack of coordinated protocols for identifying, archiving, documenting and applying observational resources.

 This presentation will discuss activities and plans of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Data Advisory Council’s (WDAC) Task Team on Observations for Model Evaluation for facilitating the use of observations for model evaluation. The presentation will include an update on the status of the obs4MIPs and ana4MIPs projects, whose purpose is to provide a limited collection of well-established and documented observation and reanalysis datasets for comparison with Earth system models, targeting CMIP in particular. The presentation will also describe the role these activities and datasets play in the development of a set of community standard observation-based climate model performance metrics by the Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE)’s Performance Metrics Panel, as well as which CMIP6 experiments these activities are targeting, and where additional community input and contributions to these activities are needed.