Abstract—Observations about inadequacy of General Climate Models (GCMs) of the sixth phase of Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) in simulating different climatological variables in several regions of the world prompted the examination of the performance of GCMs of the preceding fifth phase (CMIP5) phase vis-à-vis those of CMIP6 in simulating mean and extreme temperatures over a physiographically diverse mainland India. Selected statistics of daily temperature, simulated at 0.25×0.25 grid by 30 GCMs of CMIP6 and 28 of CMIP5, were compared with those of reference data of 27 years for performance assessment of the two phases. Significance Score, Mean Absolute Error and Index of Agreement, were applied to explore the spatial distribution of the best-performing model of each CMIP phase, and an innovative rank-based approach was devised and Taylor diagrams were used to examine the spatially aggregated performance of the models. GCMs of both CMIP6 and CMIP5 were found as being valuable in simulating one or the other temperature statistic in one or the other part of the country with no indication of one phase being consistently better than the other. The results of this extensive study shows that, the focus of development of each CMIP phase being unique, a model of CMIP5 could also have the potential of outperforming the models of CMIP6 in simulating climate variables, and that, in the case of mainland India, a GCM of either of the two phases would be appropriate for reliable projection of location-specific future temperature under different climate change scenarios.

Keywords—Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), General Climate Model (GCM), temperature, simulation, India

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Cite: Avijit Paul and Monomoy Goswami, "Does CMIP5 Still Have Value Over CMIP6? A Case of Mean and Extreme Temperature Simulation Over Mainland India," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 82-96, 2024.

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