On April 5 2023, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) convened a kick-off meeting of the CMIP7 Data Access Task Team. The meeting was hosted by the project office (CMIP-IPO), led by Prof. Robert Pincus from Columbia University.

Dr. Karl E. Taylor from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other 12 experts from 9 countries attended the meeting. As the only Chinese member of the task team, Prof. HE Bian, from the State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG) at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) joined the meeting.

The focus of the meeting was the upcoming CMIP7 and potential issues related to the release of next-generation CMIP trial data. Participants first reviewed the data release of CMIP6. It was concluded that CMIP6 is the most data-intensive and participatory comparison program since the launch of the CMIP program, with a total of 24 approved endorsed MIPs, 131 models from 48 institutions in 26 countries participating in the projects, resulting in 322 trials and nearly 25PB of stored data released at more than 30 ESGF data nodes.

The meeting further summarized the global download and use of CMIP6 data, discussed the use permission of future data and the possible solutions to optimize the release and acquisition, and defined the mission of DATT in CMIP7. It also prospected an approximate timeline of CMIP7, which expects to complete the trial design in 2023-2024, start the relevant scientific trials in 2025-2026, and hopefully complete the next IPCC Working Group report around 2028.