scholarly journals Improved Climate Simulations through a Stochastic Parameterization of Ocean Eddies

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (24) ◽  
pp. 8763-8781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Williams ◽  
Nicola J. Howe ◽  
Jonathan M. Gregory ◽  
Robin S. Smith ◽  
Manoj M. Joshi
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Global Ocean ◽  
Ocean Temperature ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Ocean Eddies ◽  
Climate Simulations ◽  
Resolution Model

Abstract In climate simulations, the impacts of the subgrid scales on the resolved scales are conventionally represented using deterministic closure schemes, which assume that the impacts are uniquely determined by the resolved scales. Stochastic parameterization relaxes this assumption, by sampling the subgrid variability in a computationally inexpensive manner. This study shows that the simulated climatological state of the ocean is improved in many respects by implementing a simple stochastic parameterization of ocean eddies into a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model. Simulations from a high-resolution, eddy-permitting ocean model are used to calculate the eddy statistics needed to inject realistic stochastic noise into a low-resolution, non-eddy-permitting version of the same model. A suite of four stochastic experiments is then run to test the sensitivity of the simulated climate to the noise definition by varying the noise amplitude and decorrelation time within reasonable limits. The addition of zero-mean noise to the ocean temperature tendency is found to have a nonzero effect on the mean climate. Specifically, in terms of the ocean temperature and salinity fields both at the surface and at depth, the noise reduces many of the biases in the low-resolution model and causes it to more closely resemble the high-resolution model. The variability of the strength of the global ocean thermohaline circulation is also improved. It is concluded that stochastic ocean perturbations can yield reductions in climate model error that are comparable to those obtained by refining the resolution, but without the increased computational cost. Therefore, stochastic parameterizations of ocean eddies have the potential to significantly improve climate simulations.

scholarly journals The Challenge of Using Future SWOT Data for Oceanic Field Reconstruction

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucile Gaultier ◽  
Clément Ubelmann ◽  
Lee-Lueng Fu
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Ocean General Circulation Model ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Satellite Mission ◽  
The Future ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
Mapping Techniques ◽  
Ocean Topography

AbstractConventional altimetry measures a one-dimensional profile of sea surface height (SSH) along the satellite track. Two-dimensional SSH can be reconstructed using mapping techniques; however, the spatial resolution is quite coarse even when data from several altimeters are analyzed. A new satellite mission based on radar interferometry is scheduled to be launched in 2020. This mission, called Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT), will measure SSH at high resolution along a wide swath, thus providing two-dimensional images of the ocean surface topography. This new capability will provide a large amount of data even though they are contaminated with instrument noise and geophysical errors. This paper presents a tool that simulates synthetic observations of SSH from the future SWOT mission using SSH from any ocean general circulation model (OGCM). SWOT-like data have been generated from a high-resolution model and analyzed to investigate the sampling and accuracy characteristics of the future SWOT data. This tool will help explore new ideas and methods for optimizing the retrieval of information from future SWOT missions.

Event detection and visualization of ocean eddies simulated by ocean general circulation model

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (03) ◽  
pp. 1950018
Author(s):  
Daisuke Matsuoka ◽  
Fumiaki Araki ◽  
Hideharu Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Numerical Study ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
General Circulation Models ◽  
Ocean Currents ◽  
Time Step ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Ocean Eddies ◽  
Ocean General Circulation

Numerical study of ocean eddies has been carried out by using high-resolution ocean general circulation models. In order to understand ocean eddies from the large volume data produced by simulations, visualizing only eddy distribution at each time step is insufficient; time-variations in eddy events and phenomena must also be considered. However, existing methods cannot precisely find and track eddy events such as amalgamation and bifurcation. In this study, we propose an original approach for eddy detection, tracking, and event visualization based on an eddy classification system. The proposed method detects streams and currents as well as eddies, and it classifies discovered eddies into several categories using the additional stream and current information. By tracking how the classified eddies vary over time, detecting events such as eddy amalgamation and bifurcation as well as the interaction between eddies and ocean currents becomes achievable. We adopt the proposed method for two ocean areas in which strong ocean currents exist as case studies. We visualize the detected eddies and events in a time series of images, allowing us to acquire an intuitive understanding of a region of interest concealed in a high-resolution data set. Furthermore, our proposed method succeeded in clarifying the occurrence place and seasonality of each type of eddy event.

scholarly journals A description of the FAMOUS (version XDBUA) climate model and control run

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. Smith ◽  
J. M. Gregory ◽  
A. Osprey
Keyword(s):  
General Circulation ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Cold Bias ◽  
Northern Latitudes ◽  
Climate Simulations ◽  
Atmosphere General Circulation Model ◽  
And Control

Abstract. FAMOUS is an ocean-atmosphere general circulation model of low resolution, capable of simulating approximately 120 years of model climate per wallclock day using current high performance computing facilities. It uses most of the same code as HadCM3, a widely used climate model of higher resolution and computational cost, and has been tuned to reproduce the same climate reasonably well. FAMOUS is useful for climate simulations where the computational cost makes the application of HadCM3 unfeasible, either because of the length of simulation or the size of the ensemble desired. We document a number of scientific and technical improvements to the original version of FAMOUS. These improvements include changes to the parameterisations of ozone and sea-ice which alleviate a significant cold bias from high northern latitudes and the upper troposphere, and the elimination of volume-averaged drifts in ocean tracers. A simple model of the marine carbon cycle has also been included. A particular goal of FAMOUS is to conduct millennial-scale paleoclimate simulations of Quaternary ice ages; to this end, a number of useful changes to the model infrastructure have been made.

Resolution Dependency of Future Caribbean Sea Level Response

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
René van Westen ◽  
Henk Dijkstra
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Caribbean Sea ◽  
Model Output ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Ocean Eddies ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
Mesoscale Processes

<div> <div> <div> <p>The current global climate models, which are often used in inter-comparison projects, have a large variety in their spatial resolution. For most climate models, the resolution of the ocean grid does not allow to resolve mesoscale processes such as ocean eddies. Current sea level projections are based on these coarse climate models, but might have biases (either positive or negative) in these projections since mesoscale processes are parameterised.</p> <p>Here we investigate the differences in future Caribbean sea level rise using a centennial simulation of a high- and low-resolution version of the Community Earth System Model under the same anthropogenic forcing. In the high-resolution version of the model mesoscale processes are resolved. Locally, we find a decrease of 7.2 cm in sea level extremes over a 100-year period in the high-resolution version; this decrease is almost absent in the low-resolution version. This local decrease in sea level extremes is related to ocean eddies, which are not resolved in the low-resolution version, hence explaining the different sea level response between the models. When comparing modelled sea level trends to observed sea level trends over the past 25 years, we find a reasonable agreement between observations and the high-resolution model. However, for the low-resolution model and some of the preliminary CMIP6 model output, there is a substantial mismatch between the observed- and modelled sea level trends.</p> <p>By analysing model output from two different resolutions of the same climate model, we find that the sea level response in the Caribbean Sea is resolution-dependent. As a result, not resolving mesoscale processes in climate models can locally result in overestimations of future sea level rise projections.</p> </div> </div> </div>

scholarly journals Towards Direct Simulation of Future Tropical Cyclone Statistics in a High-Resolution Global Atmospheric Model

2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Wehner ◽  
G. Bala ◽  
Phillip Duffy ◽  
Arthur A. Mirin ◽  
Raquel Romano
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Atmospheric Model ◽  
Tropical Storm ◽  
Model Studies ◽  
The North ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
High Resolution Model

We present a set of high-resolution global atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) simulations focusing on the model's ability to represent tropical storms and their statistics. We find that the model produces storms of hurricane strength with realistic dynamical features. We also find that tropical storm statistics are reasonable, both globally and in the north Atlantic, when compared to recent observations. The sensitivity of simulated tropical storm statistics to increases in sea surface temperature (SST) is also investigated, revealing that a credible late 21st century SST increase produced increases in simulated tropical storm numbers and intensities in all ocean basins. While this paper supports previous high-resolution model and theoretical findings that the frequency of very intense storms will increase in a warmer climate, it differs notably from previous medium and high-resolution model studies that show a global reduction in total tropical storm frequency. However, we are quick to point out that this particular model finding remains speculative due to a lack of radiative forcing changes in our time-slice experiments as well as a focus on the Northern hemisphere tropical storm seasons.

scholarly journals Calibrating Climate Change Time-Slice Projections with Estimates of Seasonal Forecast Reliability

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 3831-3840 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Matsueda ◽  
A. Weisheimer ◽  
T. N. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Seasonal Forecast ◽  
Time Slice ◽  
Climate Change Signal ◽  
Seasonal Forecasts ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Climate Change Projections ◽  
Resolution Model

Abstract In earlier work, it was proposed that the reliability of climate change projections, particularly of regional rainfall, could be improved if such projections were calibrated using quantitative measures of reliability obtained by running the same model in seasonal forecast mode. This proposal is tested for fast atmospheric processes (such as clouds and convection) by considering output from versions of the same atmospheric general circulation model run at two different resolutions and forced with prescribed sea surface temperatures and sea ice. Here output from the high-resolution version of the model is treated as a proxy for truth. The reason for using this approach is simply that the twenty-first-century climate change signal is not yet known and, hence, no climate change projections can be verified using observations. Quantitative assessments of reliability of the low-resolution model, run in seasonal hindcast mode, are used to calibrate climate change time-slice projections made with the same low-resolution model. Results show that the calibrated climate change probabilities are closer to the proxy truth than the uncalibrated probabilities. Given that seasonal forecasts are performed operationally already at several centers around the world, in a seamless forecast system they provide a resource that can be used without cost to help calibrate climate change projections and make them more reliable for users.

scholarly journals SPEAD 1.0 – A model for Simulating Plankton Evolution with Adaptive Dynamics in a two-trait continuous fitness landscape applied to the Sargasso Sea

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Le Gland ◽  
Sergio M. Vallina ◽  
S. Lan Smith ◽  
Pedro Cermeño
Keyword(s):  
General Circulation ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Adaptive Dynamics ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Global Ocean ◽  
Mutation Rates ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Continuous Trait ◽  
Trait Diversity

Abstract. Diversity plays a key role in the adaptive capacities of marine ecosystems to environmental changes. However, modeling phytoplankton trait diversity remains challenging due to the strength of the competitive exclusion of sub-optimal phenotypes. Trait diffusion (TD) is a recently developed approach to sustain diversity in plankton models by allowing the evolution of functional traits at ecological timescales. In this study, we present a model for Simulating Plankton Evolution with Adaptive Dynamics (SPEAD), where phytoplankton phenotypes characterized by two traits, nitrogen half-saturation constant and optimal temperature, can mutate at each generation using the TD mechanism. SPEAD does not resolve the different phenotypes as discrete entities, computing instead six aggregate properties: total phytoplankton biomass, mean value of each trait, trait variances, and inter-trait covariance of a single population in a continuous trait space. Therefore SPEAD resolves the dynamics of the population's continuous trait distribution by solving its statistical moments, where the variances of trait values represent the diversity of ecotypes. The ecological model is coupled to a vertically-resolved (1D) physical environment, and therefore the adaptive dynamics of the simulated phytoplankton population are driven by seasonal variations in vertical mixing, nutrient concentration, water temperature, and solar irradiance. The simulated bulk properties are validated by observations from BATS in the Sargasso Sea. We find that moderate mutation rates sustain trait diversity at decadal timescales and soften the almost total inter-trait correlation induced by the environment alone, without reducing the annual primary production or promoting permanently maladapted phenotypes, as occur with high mutation rates. As a way to evaluate the performance of the continuous-trait approximation, we also compare the solutions of SPEAD to the solutions of a classical discrete entities approach, both approaches including TD as a mechanism to sustain trait variance. We only find minor discrepancies between the continuous model SPEAD and the discrete model, the computational cost of SPEAD being lower by two orders of magnitude. Therefore SPEAD should be an ideal eco-evolutionary plankton model to be coupled to a general circulation model (GCM) at the global ocean.

Persistent Anomaly Changes in High-Resolution Climate Simulations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Gary M. Lackmann ◽  
Rebecca L. Miller ◽  
Walter A. Robinson ◽  
Allison C. Michaelis
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Circulation Index ◽  
Weather Extremes ◽  
The North ◽  
Climate Simulations ◽  
Persistent Anomalies ◽  
The Impact

AbstractPersistent anomalies (PAs) are associated with a variety of impactful weather extremes, prompting research into how their characteristics will respond to climate change. Previous studies, however, have not provided conclusive results, owing to the complexity of the phenomenon and to difficulties in general circulation model (GCM) representations of PAs. Here, we diagnose PA activity in ten years of current and projected future output from global, high-resolution (15-km mesh) time-slice simulations performed with the Model for Prediction Across Scales-Atmosphere (MPAS-A). These time slices span a range of ENSO states. They include high-resolution representations of sea-surface temperatures and GCM-based sea ice for present and future climates. Future projections, based on the RCP8.5 scenario, exhibit strong Arctic amplification and tropical upper warming, providing a valuable experiment with which to assess the impact of climate change on PA frequency. The MPAS-A present-climate simulations reproduce the main centers of observed PA activity, but with an eastward shift in the North Pacific and reduced amplitude in the North Atlantic. The overall frequency of positive PAs in the future simulations is similar to that in the present-day simulations, while negative PAs become less frequent. Although some regional changes emerge, the small, generally negative changes in PA frequency and meridional circulation index indicate that climate change does not lead to increased persistence of midlatitude flow anomalies or increased waviness in these simulations.

scholarly journals Constraints on the Profiles of Total Water PDF in AGCMs from AIRS and a High-Resolution Model

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (23) ◽  
pp. 8341-8352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Molod
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Relative Humidity ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Circulation Model ◽  
Grid Resolution ◽  
Underlying Surface ◽  
Total Water ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
High Resolution Model

Abstract Atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) cloud parameterizations generally include an assumption about the subgrid-scale probability distribution function (PDF) of total water and its vertical profile. In the present study, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) monthly-mean cloud amount and relative humidity fields are used to compute a proxy for the second moment of an AGCM total water PDF called the “RH01 diagnostic,” which is the AIRS mean relative humidity for cloud fractions of 0.1 or less. The dependence of the second moment on horizontal grid resolution is analyzed using results from a high-resolution global model simulation. The AIRS-derived RH01 diagnostic is generally larger near the surface than aloft, indicating a narrower PDF near the surface, and varies with the type of underlying surface. High-resolution model results show that the vertical structure of profiles of the AGCM PDF second moment is unchanged as the grid resolution changes from 200 to 100 to 50 km, and that the second-moment profiles shift toward higher values with decreasing grid spacing. Several Goddard Earth Observing System, version 5 (GEOS-5), AGCM simulations were performed with several choices for the profile of the PDF second moment. The resulting cloud and relative humidity fields were shown to be quite sensitive to the prescribed profile, and the use of a profile based on the AIRS-derived proxy results in improvements relative to observational estimates. The AIRS-guided total water PDF profiles, including their dependence on underlying surface type and on horizontal resolution, have been implemented in the version of the GEOS-5 AGCM used for publicly released simulations.

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