An Unprecedented Set of High-Resolution Earth System Simulations for Understanding Multiscale Interactions in Climate Variability and Change Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractWe present an unprecedented set of highresolution climate simulations, consisting of a 500year preindustrial control simulation and a 250year historical and future climate simulation from 1850 to 2100. A highresolution configuration of the Community Earth System Model version 1.3 (CESM1.3) is used for the simulations with a nominal horizontal resolution of 0.25 for the atmosphere and land models and 0.1 for the ocean and seaice models. At these resolutions, the model permits tropical cyclones and ocean mesoscale eddies, allowing interactions between these synoptic and mesoscale phenomena with largescale circulations. An overview of the results from these simulations is provided with a focus on model drift, mean climate, internal modes of variability, representation of the historical and future climates, and extreme events. Comparisons are made to solutions from an identical set of simulations using the standard resolution (nominal 1) CESM1.3 and to available observations for the historical period to address some key scientific questions concerning the impact and benefit of increasing model horizontal resolution in climate simulations. An emerging prominent feature of the highresolution preindustrial simulation is the intermittent occurrence of polynyas in the Weddell Sea and its interaction with an Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. Overall, highresolution simulations show significant improvements in representing global mean temperature changes, seasonal cycle of seasurface temperature and mixed layer depth, extreme events and in relationships between extreme events and climate modes.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN MODELING EARTH SYSTEMS

author list (cited authors)

  • Chang, P., Zhang, S., Danabasoglu, G., Yeager, S. G., Fu, H., Wang, H., ... Wu, L.

complete list of authors

  • Chang, Ping||Zhang, Shaoqing||Danabasoglu, Gokhan||Yeager, Stephen G||Fu, Haohuan||Wang, Hong||Castruccio, Frederic S||Chen, Yuhu||Edwards, James||Fu, Dan||Jia, Yinglai||Laurindo, Lucas C||Liu, Xue||Rosenbloom, Nan||Small, R Justin||Xu, Gaopeng||Zeng, Yunhui||Zhang, Qiuying||Bacmeister, Julio||Bailey, David A||Duan, Xiaohui||DuVivier, Alice K||Li, Dapeng||Li, Yuxuan||Neale, Richard||Stossel, Achim||Wang, Li||Zhuang, Yuan||Baker, Allison||Bates, Susan||Dennis, John||Diao, Xiliang||Gan, Bolan||Gopal, Abishek||Jia, Dongning||Jing, Zhao||Ma, Xiaohui||Saravanan, R||Strand, Warren G||Tao, Jian||Yang, Haiyuan||Wang, Xiaoqi||Wei, Zhiqiang||Wu, Lixin