Timothy M. Hall

Present-Day Atmospheric Simulations Using GISS ModelE: Comparison to In Situ, Satellite, and Reanalysis Data

Abstract A full description of the ModelE version of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) and results are presented for present-day climate simulations (ca. 1979). This version is a complete rewrite of previous models incorporating numerous improvements in basic physics, the stratospheric circulation, and forcing fields. Notable changes include the following: the model top is now above the stratopause, the number of vertical layers has increased, a new cloud microphysical scheme is used, vegetation biophysics now incorporates a sensitivity to humidity, atmospheric turbulence is calculated over the whole column, and new land snow and lake schemes are introduced. The performance of the model using three configurations with different horizontal and vertical resolutions is compared to quality-controlled in situ data, remotely sensed and reanalysis products. Overall, significant improvements over previous models are seen, particularly in upper-atmosphere te...

Age as a diagnostic of stratospheric transport

Estimates of stratospheric age from observations of long-lived trace gases with increasing tropospheric concentrations invoke the implicit assumption that an air parcel has been transported intact from the tropopical tropopause. However, because of rapid and irreversible mixing in the stratosphere, a particular air parcel cannot be identified with one that left the troposphere at some prior time. The parcel contains a mix of air with a range of transit times, and the mean value over this range is the most appropriate definition of age. The measured tracer concentration is also a mean over the parcel, but its value depends both on the transit time distribution and the past history of the tracer in the troposphere. In principle, only if the tropospheric concentration is increasing linearly can the age be directly inferred. We illustrate these points by employing both a one-dimensional diffusive analog of stratospheric transport, and the general circulation model (GCM) of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Within the limits of the GCM, we estimate the time over which tropospheric tracer concentrations must be approximately linear in order to determine stratospheric age unambiguously; the concentration of an exponentially increasing tracer is a function only of age if the growth time constant is greater than about 7 years, which is true for all the chlorofluorocarbons. More rapid source variations (for example, the annual cycle in CO2) have no such direct relationship with age.

Climate forcings in Goddard Institute for Space Studies SI2000 simulations

[1] We define the radiative forcings used in climate simulations with the SI2000 version of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global climate model. These include temporal variations of well-mixed greenhouse gases, stratospheric aerosols, solar irradiance, ozone, stratospheric water vapor, and tropospheric aerosols. Our illustrations focus on the period 1951–2050, but we make the full data sets available for those forcings for which we have earlier data. We illustrate the global response to these forcings for the SI2000 model with specified sea surface temperature and with a simple Q-flux ocean, thus helping to characterize the efficacy of each forcing. The model yields good agreement with observed global temperature change and heat storage in the ocean. This agreement does not yield an improved assessment of climate sensitivity or a confirmation of the net climate forcing because of possible compensations with opposite changes of these quantities. Nevertheless, the results imply that observed global temperature change during the past 50 years is primarily a response to radiative forcings. It is also inferred that the planet is now out of radiation balance by 0.5 to 1 W/m 2 and that additional global warming of about 0.5� C is already ‘‘in the pipeline.’’ INDEX TERMS: 1620 Global Change: Climate dynamics (3309); 1635 Global Change: Oceans (4203); 1650 Global Change: Solar variability;

Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE

We carry out climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE driven by ten measured or estimated climate forcings. An ensemble of climate model runs is carried out for each forcing acting individually and for all forcing mechanisms acting together. We compare side-by-side simulated climate change for each forcing, all forcings, observations, unforced variability among model ensemble members, and, if available, observed variability. Discrepancies between observations and simulations with all forcings are due to model deficiencies, inaccurate or incomplete forcings, and imperfect observations. Although there are notable discrepancies between model and observations, the fidelity is sufficient to encourage use of the model for simulations of future climate change. By using a fixed well-documented model and accurately defining the 1880–2003 forcings, we aim to provide a benchmark against which the effect of improvements in the model, climate forcings, and observations can be tested. Principal model deficiencies include unrealistically weak tropical El Nino-like variability and a poor distribution of sea ice, with too much sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere and too little in the Southern Hemisphere. Greatest uncertainties in the forcings are the temporal and spatial variations of anthropogenic aerosols and their indirect effects on clouds.

On the role of charged aerosols in polar mesosphere summer echoes

Submicron aerosols, as evidenced by the occurrence of polar mesospheric and noctilucent clouds, exist at heights from which polar mesosphere summer echoes (PMSE) are observed. We investigate the role of positively and negatively charged aerosols in the scattering processes proposed in the literature. These aerosols, if charged substantially, can account for the remarkably high radar reflectivity at both VHF and UHF by raising the electron Schmidt number through the ambipolar effect. A positively charged component may be responsible for enhanced UHF radar scatter by increasing the incoherent scatter power through a dressed dust effect, although such a process is not realistic as an explanation for VHF scatter during PMSE. Such an enhanced UHF scatter will be associated with extremely narrow backscatter spectra. We propose a model in which both negatively and positively charged aerosols are present to explain both the radar properties and the rocket probe observations of charged particle depletions. Finally, we point out that the Poker Flat 50-MHz long-term data, which contrary to accepted dynamical theory show average downward velocities in the summertime upper mesosphere, can be attributed to the fall speed of the aerosols responsible for PMSE.

Evaluation of transport in stratospheric models

We evaluate transport characteristics of two- and three-dimensional chemical transport models of the stratosphere by comparing their simulations of the mean age of stratospheric air and the propagation of annually periodic oscillations in tracer mixing ratio at the tropical tropopause into the stratosphere to inferences from in situ and satellite observations of CO2, SF6, and water vapor. The models, participants in the recent NASA “Models and Measurements II” study, display a wide range of performance. Most models propagate annual oscillations too rapidly in the vertical and overattenuate the signal. Most models also significantly underestimate mean age throughout the stratosphere, and most have at least one of several unrealistic features in their mean age contour shapes. In the lower stratosphere, model-to-model variation in N2O, NOy, and Cly is well correlated with variation in mean age, and the magnitude of NOy and Cly variation is large. We conclude that model transport inaccuracies significantly affect simulations of important long-lived chemical species in the lower stratosphere.

Anthropogenic CO2 in the oceans estimated using transit time distributions

The distribution of anthropogenic carbon (Cant) in the oceans is estimated using the transit time distribution (TTD) method applied to global measurements of chlorofluorocarbon-12 (CFC12). Unlike most other inference methods, the TTD method does not assume a single ventilation time and avoids the large uncertainty incurred by attempts to correct for the large natural carbon background in dissolved inorganic carbon measurements. The highest concentrations and deepest penetration of anthropogenic carbon are found in the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans. The estimated total inventory in 1994 is 134 Pg-C. To evaluate uncertainties the TTD method is applied to output from an ocean general circulation model (OGCM) and compared the results to the directly simulated Cant. Outside of the Southern Ocean the predicted Cant closely matches the directly simulated distribution, but in the Southern Ocean the TTD concentrations are biased high due to the assumption of ‘constant disequilibrium’. The net result is a TTD overestimate of the global inventory by about 20%. Accounting for this bias and other centred uncertainties, an inventory range of 94–121 Pg-C is obtained. This agrees with the inventory of Sabine et al., who applied the ΔC* method to the same data. There are, however, significant differences in the spatial distributions: The TTD estimates are smaller than ΔC* in the upper ocean and larger at depth, consistent with biases expected in ΔC* given its assumption of a single parcel ventilation time.

Transit-Time and Tracer-Age Distributions in Geophysical Flows

Transport in the atmosphere and in the ocean is the result of the complex action of time-dependent and often highly turbulent flow. A useful diagnostic that summarizes the rate at which fluid elements are transported from some region to a point (or the reverse) via a multiplicity of pathways and mechanisms is the probability density function (pdf ) of transit times. The first moment of this pdf, often referred to as ‘‘mean age,’’ has become an important transport diagnostic commonly used by the observational community. This paper explores how to probe the flow with passive tracers to extract transit-time pdf’s. As a foundation, the literal ‘‘tracer age’’ is defined as the elapsed time since tracer was injected into the flow, and the corresponding tracer-age distribution, Z, as the fractional tracer mass in a given interval of tracer age. The distribution, Z, has concrete physical interpretation for arbitrary sources, but is only equivalent to a tracer-independent transit-time pdf of the flow in special cases. The transit-time pdf is a propagator, G9, of boundary conditions (the ‘‘age spectrum’’ of T. M. Hall and R. A. Plumb) applied over a control surface, V. The propagator G9 is shown to be the flux into V resulting from a unit mass injected into the time-reversed flow. Through explicit construction of the transit-time pdf using the concept of tracer age, the special cases for which Z and G9 coincide are established. This allows a direct physical demonstration of G9, and its adjoint G9† , as the pdf’s of transit times since fluid at point r had last contact with V, and until fluid at r will have first contact with V, respectively. In the limit as V is shrunk to a point, point-to-point transit-time pdf’s are well defined, but their mean transit time and higher-order moments become infinite. Several concrete geophysical examples are considered to illustrate under what conditions characteristics of tracer-age and transit-time pdf’s can be inferred from observations in the atmosphere or the ocean.

A Generalized Transport Theory: Water-Mass Composition and Age

Abstract A general theory to describe and understand advective and diffusive ocean transport is reported. It allows any passive tracer field with an atmospheric source to be constructed by superposing sea surface contributions with a generalized Greens function called the boundary propagator of the passive tracer equation. The boundary propagator has the interpretation of the joint water-mass and transit-time distribution from the sea surface. The theory thus includes the classical oceanographic idea of water-mass analysis and extends it to allow for a distribution of transit times from the sea surface. The joint water-mass and transit-time distribution contains complete information about the transport processes in the flow. It captures this information in a more accessible way than using velocity and diffusivity fields, however, at least for the case of sequestration and transport of dissolved material by the ocean circulation. The boundary propagator is thus the natural quantity to consider when discus...

Statistical modelling of North Atlantic tropical cyclone tracks

We present a statistical model of North Atlantic tropical cyclone tracks from genesis site through lysis. To propagate tracks we use the means and variances of latitudinal and longitudinal displacements and model the remaining anomalies as autoregressive. Coefficients are determined by averaging near-neighbour historical track data, with ‘near’ determined optimally by using jackknife out-of-sample validation to maximize the likelihood of the observations. The number of cyclones in a simulated year is sampled randomly from the historical record, and the cyclone genesis sites are simulated with a spatial probability density function using kernels with optimized bandwidths. Simulated cyclones suffer lysis with a probability again determined from optimal averaging of historical lysis rates. We evaluate the track model by comparing an ensemble of 1950–2003 simulations to the historical record using several diagnostics, including landfall rates. In most regions, but not all, the observations fall within the variability across the ensemble members, indicating that the simulations and observations are statistically indistinguishable. An intensity component to the TC model, necessary for risk assessment applications, is currently under development.