Intercomparison of the northern hemisphere winter mid-latitude atmospheric variability of the IPCC models

Details Intercomparison of the northern hemisphere winter mid-latitude atmospheric variability of the IPCC models Intercomparison of the northern hemisphere winter mid-latitude atmospheric variability of the IPCC models

2006-01-17

arxiv.org/abs/physics/0601117v1

Climate Dynamics 28, 829-848 (2007)

Physics

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics

39 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables

Scientific paper

10.1007/s00382-006-0213-x

We compare, for the overlapping time frame 1962-2000, the estimate of the northern hemisphere (NH) mid-latitude winter atmospheric variability within the XX century simulations of 17 global climate models (GCMs) included in the IPCC-4AR with the NCEP and ECMWF reanalyses. We compute the Hayashi spectra of the 500hPa geopotential height fields and introduce an integral measure of the variability observed in the NH on different spectral sub-domains. Only two high-resolution GCMs have a good agreement with reanalyses. Large biases, in most cases larger than 20%, are found between the wave climatologies of most GCMs and the reanalyses, with a relative span of around 50%. The travelling baroclinic waves are usually overestimated, while the planetary waves are usually underestimated, in agreement with previous studies performed on global weather forecasting models. When comparing the results of various versions of similar GCMs, it is clear that in some cases the vertical resolution of the atmosphere and, somewhat unexpectedly, of the adopted ocean model seem to be critical in determining the agreement with the reanalyses. The GCMs ensemble is biased with respect to the reanalyses but is comparable to the best 5 GCMs. This study suggests serious caveats with respect to the ability of most of the presently available GCMs in representing the statistics of the global scale atmospheric dynamics of the present climate and, a fortiori, in the perspective of modelling climate change.

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