This dataset provides ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) Atmospheric Global Circulation Model (GCM) data for global radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE) 5-year simulations. Data files are provided in NetCDF format.

The RCE simulations are setup on an aquaplanet with no rotation and no diurnal cycle. To initialise the RCE state, homogenised boundary conditions are set where the solar insolation is 551.58 Wm-2 with a fixed zenith angle of 42.05. Together these values give a constant insolation of 409.6 Wm-2. This is equivalent to the annual mean tropical insolation (Wing et al., 2018). A 360-day calendar is used. The global ocean albedo is set to 0.07. Concentrations of tracers CO2, CH4, N2O and O2 are set to be constant in space and time and the O3 profile is the same as used in Popke et al. (2013). SSTs are kept globally constant throughout each simulation at either 290K or 305K. The model spin-up is done for 1 month, with horizontally homogenised radiative fluxes, where the longwave and shortwave cooling rates are averaged horizontally at each model level and timestep. Then the domain-averaged conditions over the final 5 days of these simulations are used to initialise the simulations, following Wing et al. (2018). Each simulation is then run for 5 years. Model output is given every 5 days, as a 5-day mean. Most simulations have been run with interactive radiation. However, in some, radiative feedbacks have been turned off by horizontally homogenising the radiative cooling rates at each model level and timestep, following Muller & Held (2012).

Some simulations include a diabatic heating perturbation. This is achieved using the Max Planck Institute Aerosol Climatology version 2, Simple Plume (MACv2-SP) model. This model prescribes idealised aerosol plumes. Parameters that can be tailored include the aerosol optical depth (AOD), single scattering albedo (SSA), and plume spatial extent, and these are given as functions of time and wavelength. In this dataset, we remove any temporal dependence and use constant parameters for each variable. We also only use a single plume in our simulations. Experiments are performed with a single plume at latitude = 0, longitude = 0, AOD = 1.8 and SSA = 0.8. There are a couple of exceptions to this:
- In file crh_aod_sensitivity.nc the AOD is varied from 0.3 to 1.8.
- In files 290K_plume_homogLW_*.nc the AOD used is 1
- In files 305K_plume_homogLW_*.nc the AOD used is 0.8.