Gill Martin

U.K. HiGEM: The New U.K. High-Resolution Global Environment Model—Model Description and Basic Evaluation

Abstract This article describes the development and evaluation of the U.K.’s new High-Resolution Global Environmental Model (HiGEM), which is based on the latest climate configuration of the Met Office Unified Model, known as the Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model, version 1 (HadGEM1). In HiGEM, the horizontal resolution has been increased to 0.83° latitude × 1.25° longitude for the atmosphere, and 1/3° × 1/3° globally for the ocean. Multidecadal integrations of HiGEM, and the lower-resolution HadGEM, are used to explore the impact of resolution on the fidelity of climate simulations. Generally, SST errors are reduced in HiGEM. Cold SST errors associated with the path of the North Atlantic drift improve, and warm SST errors are reduced in upwelling stratocumulus regions where the simulation of low-level cloud is better at higher resolution. The ocean model in HiGEM allows ocean eddies to be partially resolved, which dramatically improves the representation of sea surface height variability. In the S...

Spatial Patterns of Precipitation Change in CMIP5: Why the Rich Do Not Get Richer in the Tropics

AbstractChanges in the patterns of tropical precipitation (P) and circulation are analyzed in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) GCMs under the representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. A robust weakening of the tropical circulation is seen across models, associated with a divergence feedback that acts to reduce convection most in areas of largest climatological ascent. This is in contrast to the convergence feedback seen in interannual variability of tropical precipitation patterns. The residual pattern of convective mass-flux change is associated with shifts in convergence zones due to mechanisms such as SST gradient change, and this is often locally larger than the weakening due to the divergence feedback.A simple framework is constructed to separate precipitation change into components based on different mechanisms and to relate it directly to circulation change. While the tropical mean increase in precipitation is due to the residual between the positive thermodyn...

Analysis and Reduction of Systematic Errors through a Seamless Approach to Modeling Weather and Climate

Abstract The reduction of systematic errors is a continuing challenge for model development. Feedbacks and compensating errors in climate models often make finding the source of a systematic error difficult. In this paper, it is shown how model development can benefit from the use of the same model across a range of temporal and spatial scales. Two particular systematic errors are examined: tropical circulation and precipitation distribution, and summer land surface temperature and moisture biases over Northern Hemisphere continental regions. Each of these errors affects the model performance on time scales ranging from a few days to several decades. In both cases, the characteristics of the long-time-scale errors are found to develop during the first few days of simulation, before any large-scale feedbacks have taken place. The ability to compare the model diagnostics from the first few days of a forecast, initialized from a realistic atmospheric state, directly with observations has allowed physical def...

The role of northern Arabian Sea surface temperature biases in CMIP5 model simulations and future projections of Indian summer monsoon rainfall

Many climate models have problems simulating Indian summer monsoon rainfall and its variability, resulting in considerable uncertainty in future projections. Problems may relate to many factors, such as local effects of the formulation of physical parametrisation schemes, while common model biases that develop elsewhere within the climate system may also be important. Here we examine the extent and impact of cold sea surface temperature (SST) biases developing in the northern Arabian Sea in the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble, where such SST biases are shown to be common. Such biases have previously been shown to reduce monsoon rainfall in the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) by weakening moisture fluxes incident upon India. The Arabian Sea SST biases in CMIP5 models consistently develop in winter, via strengthening of the winter monsoon circulation, and persist into spring and summer. A clear relationship exists between Arabian Sea cold SST bias and weak monsoon rainfall in CMIP5 models, similar to effects in the MetUM. Part of this effect may also relate to other factors, such as forcing of the early monsoon by spring-time excessive equatorial precipitation. Atmosphere-only future time-slice experiments show that Arabian Sea cold SST biases have potential to weaken future monsoon rainfall increases by limiting moisture flux acceleration through non-linearity of the Clausius–Clapeyron relationship. Analysis of CMIP5 model future scenario simulations suggests that such effects are small compared to other sources of uncertainty, although models with large Arabian Sea cold SST biases may suppress the range of potential outcomes for changes to future early monsoon rainfall.

Surface warming patterns drive tropical rainfall pattern responses to CO2 forcing on all timescales

Mechanisms behind regional tropical rainfall responses to CO2 forcing are examined in idealized climate model experiments, traceable to transient forcing scenarios. As previously shown, the pattern of the first-year response of dynamical precipitation change to an abrupt CO2 increase is similar to the century-scale response. It is demonstrated here that this similarity is driven by surface temperature pattern change, not a direct atmospheric circulation response to CO2. This confirms the “Warmer get Wetter” hypothesis, which emphasizes the role of sea surface temperature pattern change in driving regional tropical precipitation change. Future regional rainfall changes should thus be studied primarily in coupled ocean-atmosphere models.

The resolution sensitivity of the South Asian monsoon and Indo-Pacific in a global 0.35° AGCM

The South Asian monsoon is one of the most significant manifestations of the seasonal cycle. It directly impacts nearly one third of the world’s population and also has substantial global influence. Using 27-year integrations of a high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model (Met Office Unified Model), we study changes in South Asian monsoon precipitation and circulation when horizontal resolution is increased from approximately 200–40 km at the equator (N96–N512, 1.9°–0.35°). The high resolution, integration length and ensemble size of the dataset make this the most extensive dataset used to evaluate the resolution sensitivity of the South Asian monsoon to date. We find a consistent pattern of JJAS precipitation and circulation changes as resolution increases, which include a slight increase in precipitation over peninsular India, changes in Indian and Indochinese orographic rain bands, increasing wind speeds in the Somali Jet, increasing precipitation over the Maritime Continent islands and decreasing precipitation over the northern Maritime Continent seas. To diagnose which resolution-related processes cause these changes, we compare them to published sensitivity experiments that change regional orography and coastlines. Our analysis indicates that improved resolution of the East African Highlands results in the improved representation of the Somali Jet and further suggests that improved resolution of orography over Indochina and the Maritime Continent results in more precipitation over the Maritime Continent islands at the expense of reduced precipitation further north. We also evaluate the resolution sensitivity of monsoon depressions and lows, which contribute more precipitation over northeast India at higher resolution. We conclude that while increasing resolution at these scales does not solve the many monsoon biases that exist in GCMs, it has a number of small, beneficial impacts.

Evaluating the East Asian monsoon simulation in climate models

[1] Metrics are widely used as a tool for model evaluation to assess both the performance of and changes between different generations of models. However, often the choice of metrics is limited to simple root-mean-square statistics, and it can be difficult to interpret the quality of the models in representing important physical processes. In this study, metrics have been gathered from the available literature and have been refined and augmented to include the climatology, the evolution of the rainy season, and the interannual variability of the East Asian monsoon. We investigate how these process-based metrics may be used to evaluate the simulation of the characteristics of the East Asian monsoon in climate models. The metrics confirm previous findings that climate models tend to exhibit skill in simulating the climatology and variability of temperature and winds, with lower skill in simulating precipitation distribution, seasonal cycle, and interannual variability. However, this work illustrates that a wide variety of metrics is required to make a comprehensive evaluation of East Asian climate in global circulation models. These must include consideration of both the local conditions and the large-scale circulation and measures of the seasonal cycle and interannual variability. It is also apparent that careful choice of analyzed regions must be made to avoid cancellation of biases. Such comprehensive evaluation of regional climate can be useful in estimation of current climate model performance and model development.

A process-based evaluation of dust-emitting winds in the CMIP5 simulation of HadGEM2-ES

Despite the importance of dust aerosol in the Earth system, state-of-the-art models show a large variety for North African dust emission. This study presents a systematic evaluation of dust emitting-winds in 30 years of the historical model simulation with the UK Met Office Earth-system model HadGEM2-ES for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. Isolating the effect of winds on dust emission and using an automated detection for nocturnal low-level jets (NLLJs) allow an in-depth evaluation of the model performance for dust emission from a meteorological perspective. The findings highlight that NLLJs are a key driver for dust emission in HadGEM2-ES in terms of occurrence frequency and strength. The annually and spatially averaged occurrence frequency of NLLJs is similar in HadGEM2-ES and ERA-Interim from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Compared to ERA-Interim, a stronger pressure ridge over northern Africa in winter and the southward displaced heat low in summer result in differences in location and strength of NLLJs. Particularly the larger geostrophic winds associated with the stronger ridge have a strengthening effect on NLLJs over parts of West Africa in winter. Stronger NLLJs in summer may rather result from an artificially increased mixing coefficient under stable stratification that is weaker in HadGEM2-ES. NLLJs in the Bodélé Depression are affected by stronger synoptic-scale pressure gradients in HadGEM2-ES. Wintertime geostrophic winds can even be so strong that the associated vertical wind shear prevents the formation of NLLJs. These results call for further model improvements in the synoptic-scale dynamics and the physical parametrization of the nocturnal stable boundary layer to better represent dust-emitting processes in the atmospheric model. The new approach could be used for identifying systematic behavior in other models with respect to meteorological processes for dust emission. This would help to improve dust emission simulations and contribute to decreasing the currently large uncertainty in climate change projections with respect to dust aerosol.

Understanding the West African Monsoon from the analysis of diabatic heating distributions as simulated by climate models

Understanding the West African Monsoon from the analysis of diabatic heating distributions as simulated by climate models

Quantifying and Reducing Uncertainty in the Large-Scale Response of the Water Cycle

Despite their obvious environmental, societal and economic importance, our understanding of the causes and magnitude of the variations in the global water cycle is still unsatisfactory. Uncertainties in hydrological predictions from the current generation of models pose a serious challenge to the reliability of forecasts and projections across time and space scales. This paper provides an overview of the current issues and challenges in modelling various aspects of the Earth’s hydrological cycle. These include: the global water budget and water conservation, the role of model resolution and parametrisation of precipitation-generating processes on the representation of the global and regional hydrological cycle, representation of clouds and microphysical processes, rainfall variability, the influence of land–atmosphere coupling on rainfall patterns and their variability, monsoon processes and teleconnections, and ocean and cryosphere modelling. We conclude that continued collaborative activity in the areas of model development across timescales, process studies and climate change studies will provide better understanding of how and why the hydrological cycle may change, and better estimation of uncertainty in model projections of changes in the global water cycle.