A new global climate model, MRI-CGCM3, has been developed at the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI). This model is an overall upgrade of MRI’s former climate model MRI-CGCM2 series. MRI-CGCM3 is composed of atmosphere-land, aerosol, and ocean-ice models, and is a subset of the MRI’s earth system model MRI-ESM1. Atmospheric component MRI-AGCM3 is interactively coupled with aerosol model to represent direct and indirect effects of aerosols with a new cloud microphysics scheme. Basic experiments for pre-industrial control, historical and climate sensitivity are performed with MRI-CGCM3. In the pre-industrial control experiment, the model exhibits very stable behavior without climatic drifts, at least in the radiation budget, the temperature near the surface and the major indices of ocean circulations. The sea surface temperature (SST) drift is sufficiently small, while there is a 1 W m-2 heating imbalance at the surface. The model’s climate sensitivity is estimated to be 2.11 K with Gregory’s method. The transient climate response (TCR) to 1 % yr-1 increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is 1.6 K with doubling of CO2 concentration and 4.1 K with quadrupling of CO2 concentration. The simulated present-day mean climate in the historical experiment is evaluated by comparison with observations, including reanalysis. The model reproduces the overall mean climate, including seasonal variation in various aspects in the atmosphere and the oceans. Variability in the simulated climate is also evaluated and is found to be realistic, including El Niño and Southern Oscillation and the Arctic and Antarctic oscillations. However, some important issues are identified. The simulated SST indicates generally cold bias in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and warm bias in the Southern Hemisphere (SH), and the simulated sea ice expands excessively in the North Atlantic in winter. A double ITCZ also appears in the tropical Pacific, particularly in the austral summer.