Predictions of future climate, essential for safeguarding society and ecosystems, are underpinned by numerical models of the Earth system.  These models are routinely tested against, and in many cases tuned towards, observations of the modern Earth system.  However, the model predictions of the climate of the end of this century lie largely outside of this evaluation period, due to the projected future CO₂ forcing being significantly greater than that seen in the observational record.  Indeed, recent work reconstructing past CO₂ has shown that the closest analogues to the 22^nd century, in terms of CO₂ concentration, are tens of millions of years ago, in ‘Deep-Time’.

DeepMIP is dedicated to conceiving, designing, carrying out, analysing, and disseminating, an international effort to improve our understanding of Deep Time climates.

Objectives of the DeepMIP group

• To foster closer links between the palaeoclimate modelling and data communities.
• To design experiments for the MIP, through discussion with both model and data communities.
• To carry out such simulations with a wide range of state-of-the-art models.
• To create and collate and synthesise datasets where appropriate to enable meaningful model-data comparisons.
• To analyse the results with the aims of evaluating the models, understanding the reasons behind the model-model and model-data differences, and, where possible, providing suggestions for model improvements.
• To carry out the above in such a way as to facilitate contribution to the IPCC.

DeepMIP is part of the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP), which itself is affiliated to CMIP6.

DeepMIP currently has three components – DeepMIP-Miocene, DeepMIP-EOT and DeepMIP-Eocene.