Cristiana Stan

High-Resolution Global Climate Simulations with the ECMWF Model in Project Athena: Experimental Design, Model Climate, and Seasonal Forecast Skill

AbstractThe sensitivity to the horizontal resolution of the climate, anthropogenic climate change, and seasonal predictive skill of the ECMWF model has been studied as part of Project Athena—an international collaboration formed to test the hypothesis that substantial progress in simulating and predicting climate can be achieved if mesoscale and subsynoptic atmospheric phenomena are more realistically represented in climate models.In this study the experiments carried out with the ECMWF model (atmosphere only) are described in detail. Here, the focus is on the tropics and the Northern Hemisphere extratropics during boreal winter. The resolutions considered in Project Athena for the ECMWF model are T159 (126 km), T511 (39 km), T1279 (16 km), and T2047 (10 km). It was found that increasing horizontal resolution improves the tropical precipitation, the tropical atmospheric circulation, the frequency of occurrence of Euro-Atlantic blocking, and the representation of extratropical cyclones in large parts of th...

Vertical structure and physical processes of the Madden-Julian Oscillation: Exploring key model physics in climate simulations

Aimed at reducing deficiencies in representing the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in general circulation models (GCMs), a global model evaluation project on vertical structure and physical processes of the MJO was coordinated. In this paper, results from the climate simulation component of this project are reported. It is shown that the MJO remains a great challenge in these latest generation GCMs. The systematic eastward propagation of the MJO is only well simulated in about one fourth of the total participating models. The observed vertical westward tilt with altitude of the MJO is well simulated in good MJO models but not in the poor ones. Damped Kelvin wave responses to the east of convection in the lower troposphere could be responsible for the missing MJO preconditioning process in these poor MJO models. Several process-oriented diagnostics were conducted to discriminate key processes for realistic MJO simulations. While large-scale rainfall partition and low-level mean zonal winds over the Indo-Pacific in a model are not found to be closely associated with its MJO skill, two metrics, including the low-level relative humidity difference between high- and low-rain events and seasonal mean gross moist stability, exhibit statistically significant correlations with the MJO performance. It is further indicated that increased cloud-radiative feedback tends to be associated with reduced amplitude of intraseasonal variability, which is incompatible with the radiative instability theory previously proposed for the MJO. Results in this study confirm that inclusion of air-sea interaction can lead to significant improvement in simulating the MJO.

Tropical Cyclone Climatology in a 10-km Global Atmospheric GCM: Toward Weather-Resolving Climate Modeling

AbstractNorthern Hemisphere tropical cyclone (TC) activity is investigated in multiyear global climate simulations with the ECMWF Integrated Forecast System (IFS) at 10-km resolution forced by the observed records of sea surface temperature and sea ice. The results are compared to analogous simulations with the 16-, 39-, and 125-km versions of the model as well as observations.In the North Atlantic, mean TC frequency in the 10-km model is comparable to the observed frequency, whereas it is too low in the other versions. While spatial distributions of the genesis and track densities improve systematically with increasing resolution, the 10-km model displays qualitatively more realistic simulation of the track density in the western subtropical North Atlantic. In the North Pacific, the TC count tends to be too high in the west and too low in the east for all resolutions. These model errors appear to be associated with the errors in the large-scale environmental conditions that are fairly similar in this reg...

Revolutionizing Climate Modeling with Project Athena: A Multi-Institutional, International Collaboration

The importance of using dedicated high-end computing resources to enable high spatial resolution in global climate models and advance knowledge of the climate system has been evaluated in an international collaboration called Project Athena. Inspired by the World Modeling Summit of 2008 and made possible by the availability of dedicated high-end computing resources provided by the National Science Foundation from October 2009 through March 2010, Project Athena demonstrated the sensitivity of climate simulations to spatial resolution and to the representation of subgrid-scale processes with horizontal resolutions up to 10 times higher than contemporary climate models. While many aspects of the mean climate were found to be reassuringly similar, beyond a suggested minimum resolution, the magnitudes and structure of regional effects can differ substantially. Project Athena served as a pilot project to demonstrate that an effective international collaboration can be formed to efficiently exploit dedicated sup...

The Asian Monsoon in the Superparameterized CCSM and Its Relationship to Tropical Wave Activity

AbstractThree general circulation models (GCMs) are used to analyze the impacts of air–sea coupling and superparameterized (SP) convection on the Asian summer monsoon: Community Climate System Model (CCSM) (coupled, conventional convection), SP Community Atmosphere Model (SP-CAM) (uncoupled, SP convection), and SP-CCSM (coupled, SP). In SP-CCSM, coupling improves the basic-state climate relative to SP-CAM and reduces excessive tropical variability in SP-CAM. Adding SP improves tropical variability, the simulation of easterly zonal shear over the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, and increases negative sea surface temperature (SST) biases in that region.SP-CCSM is the only model to reasonably simulate the eastward-, westward-, and northward-propagating components of the Asian monsoon. CCSM and SP-CCSM mimic the observed phasing of northward-propagating intraseasonal oscillation (NPISO), SST, precipitation, and surface stress anomalies, while SP-CAM is limited in this regard. SP-CCSM produces a variety of ...

Evidence for Enhanced Land–Atmosphere Feedback in a Warming Climate

AbstractGlobal simulations have been conducted with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts operational model run at T1279 resolution for multiple decades representing climate from the late twentieth and late twenty-first centuries. Changes in key components of the water cycle are examined, focusing on variations at short time scales. Metrics of coupling and feedbacks between soil moisture and surface fluxes and between surface fluxes and properties of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) are inspected. Features of precipitation and other water cycle trends from coupled climate model consensus projections are well simulated. Extreme 6-hourly rainfall totals become more intense over much of the globe, suggesting an increased risk for flash floods. Seasonal-scale droughts are projected to escalate over much of the subtropics and midlatitudes during summer, while tropical and winter droughts become less likely. These changes are accompanied by an increase in the responsiveness of surface evapotr...

Northward Propagation Mechanisms of the Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation in the ERA-Interim and SP-CCSM

AbstractMechanisms for the northward propagation (NP) of the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation (BSISO) and associated Asian summer monsoon (ASM) are investigated using data from the interim ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim, herein called ERAI) and the superparameterized Community Climate System Model (SP-CCSM). Analyzed mechanisms are 1) destabilization of the lower troposphere by sea surface temperature anomalies, 2) boundary layer moisture advection, and boundary layer convergence associated with 3) SST gradients and 4) barotropic vorticity anomalies. Mechanism indices are regressed onto filtered OLR anomaly time series to study their relationships to the intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) and to equatorial Rossby (ER) waves.Northward propagation in ERAI and SP-CCSM is promoted by several mechanisms, but is dominated by boundary layer moisture advection and the barotropic vorticity effect. SST-linked mechanisms are of secondary importance but are nonnegligible. The magnitudes of NP mechanisms vary from...

Intraseasonal Variability in Coupled GCMs: The Roles of Ocean Feedbacks and Model Physics

AbstractThe interaction of ocean coupling and model physics in the simulation of the intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) is explored with three general circulation models: the Community Atmospheric Model, versions 3 and 4 (CAM3 and CAM4), and the superparameterized CAM3 (SPCAM3). Each is integrated coupled to an ocean model, and as an atmosphere-only model using sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from the coupled SPCAM3, which simulates a realistic ISO. For each model, the ISO is best simulated with coupling. For each SST boundary condition, the ISO is best simulated in SPCAM3.Near-surface vertical gradients of specific humidity, (temperature, ), explain ~20% (50%) of tropical Indian Ocean latent (sensible) heat flux variance, and somewhat less of west Pacific variance. In turn, local SST anomalies explain ~5% (25%) of variance in coupled simulations, and less in uncoupled simulations. Ergo, latent and sensible heat fluxes are strongly controlled by wind speed fluctuations, which are largest in the coupled simul...

Climate simulations and projections with a super-parameterized climate model

The mean climate and its variability are analyzed in a suite of numerical experiments with a fully coupled general circulation model in which subgrid-scale moist convection is explicitly represented through embedded 2D cloud-system resolving models. Control simulations forced by the present day, fixed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration are conducted using two horizontal resolutions and validated against observations and reanalyses. The mean state simulated by the higher resolution configuration has smaller biases. Climate variability also shows some sensitivity to resolution but not as uniform as in the case of mean state. The interannual and seasonal variability are better represented in the simulation at lower resolution whereas the subseasonal variability is more accurate in the higher resolution simulation. The equilibrium climate sensitivity of the model is estimated from a simulation forced by an abrupt quadrupling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. The equilibrium climate sensitivity temperature of the model is 2.77^oC, and this value is slightly smaller than the mean value (3.37^oC) of contemporary models using conventional representation of cloud processes. The climate change simulation forced by the representative concentration pathway 8.5 scenario projects an increase in the frequency of severe droughts over most of the North America.

The influence of atmospheric noise and uncertainty in ocean initial conditions on the limit of predictability in a coupled GCM

Abstract The influence of atmospheric stochastic forcing and uncertainty in initial conditions on the limit of predictability of the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFS) is quantified based on comparisons of idealized identical twin prediction experiments using two different coupling strategies. In the first method, called the interactive ensemble, a single oceanic general circulation model (GCM; the Modular Ocean Model version 3 of GFDL) is coupled to the ensemble average of multiple realizations (in this case six ensemble members) of an atmospheric GCM (NCEP Global Forecast System). In the second method the standard CFS is used. The interactive ensemble is specifically designed to reduce the internal atmospheric dynamic fluctuations that are unrelated to the sea surface temperature anomalies via ensemble averaging at the air–sea interface, whereas in the standard CFS, the atmospheric noise (i.e., stochastic forcing) plays an active role in the evolution of the coupled system. In the identical twin experim...