ACCESS1.0 uses the following components: British MetOffice UM atmospheric model, GFDL MOM4p1 ocean model, LANL CICE4.1 sea ice model and MOSES2 land model. Historical experiments are long-term simulations of the 20th century climate. External forcings include: solar radiation, volcanic activity, stratospheric aerosols, anthropogenic aerosols, and greenhouse gas concentrations. Greenhouse gas concentrations include: CO2, N2O, CH4, CFC11, CFC12, CFC113, HCFC22, HFC125, HFC134a. The overall membership is defined by a version describing specific initial conditions, initialization methods, and disturbance physics. These are only valid in certain models, so r2i1p1 will have the same initialization and physical scheme as the ACCESS1-0 r1i1p1 simulation, but with different initial conditions.

The simulated raw output goes through the following steps: post-processing, quality control and release. There are three levels of quality control for CMIP5 data: QC1 data and metadata checks automatically applied by CMOR2 and Earth System Grid data publishing software; use the description in https://redmine.dkrz.de/projects/cmip5-qc/wiki/Qc_level_2 The QC L2 tool performs QC2 data consistency checks; QC3 carries out extended checks on data and metadata by the World Climate Data Center. The ACCESS CMIP5 data set has passed Level 1 and Level 2 quality control checks. CMIP5 data is published and archived on the Earth System Grid and is available at the National Institute of Computing and Infrastructure (NCI). Each variable is stored in a separate netcdf file in the following subset:

"Day" of daily data;

"Amon" of monthly atmospheric data;

"Omon" of monthly ocean data;

"OImon" of the monthly data of sea ice;

"Lmon" of monthly land data;

"LImon" of land ice moon data;

"Aero" of monthly aerosol data.