COSP: Satellite simulation software for model assessment

The Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project (CFMIP) community has developed an integrated satellite simulator, the CFMIP Observation Simulator Package (COSP). COSP is a flexible software tool that enables the simulation from model variables of data from several satellite-borne active and passive sensors. COSP facilitates the evaluation of models against observations and comparisons between them in a more consistent manner. Two of the models used in this study are GCMs used in the latest IPCC assessment reports, and the others are two versions of the multiscale modeling framework (MMF) with different horizontal and vertical resolutions of the embedded cloud-resolving model. It is found that the MMF simulations perform better than the other climate models in all the diagnostics, showing a distribution of hydrometeors in the vertical and also in optical depth closer to the observations.