Modification of the Gravity Wave Parameterization in the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model: Motivation and Results

The current standard version of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) simulates Southern Hemisphere winter and spring temperatures that are too cold compared with observations. This “cold-pole bias” leads to unrealistically low ozone column amounts in Antarctic spring. Here, the cold-pole problem is addressed by introducing additional mechanical forcing of the circulation via parameterized gravity waves. Insofar as observational guidance is ambiguous regarding the gravity waves that might be important in the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere, the impact of increasing the forcing by orographic gravity waves was investigated. This reduces the strength of the Antarctic polar vortex in WACCM, bringing it into closer agreement with observations, and accelerates the Brewer–Dobson circulation in the polar stratosphere, which warms the polar cap and improves substantially the simulation of Antarctic temperature. These improvements are achieved without degrading the performance of the model in the Northern Hemisphere stratosphere or in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere of either hemisphere. It is shown, finally, that other approaches that enhance gravity wave forcing can also reduce the cold-pole bias such that careful examination of observational evidence and model performance will be required to establish which gravity wave sources are dominant in the real atmosphere. This is especially important because a “downward control” analysis of these results suggests that the improvement of the cold-pole bias itself is not very sensitive to the details of how gravity wave drag is altered.