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

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Abstract

We compare, for the overlapping time frame 1962–2000, the estimate of the northern hemisphere mid-latitude winter atmospheric variability within the available 20th century simulations of 19 global climate models included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—4th Assessment Report with the NCEP-NCAR and ECMWF reanalyses. We compute the Hayashi spectra of the 500 hPa geopotential height fields and introduce an ad hoc integral measure of the variability observed in the Northern Hemisphere on different spectral sub-domains. The total wave variability is taken as a global scalar metric describing the overall performance of each model, while the total variability pertaining to the eastward propagating baroclinic waves and to the planetary waves are taken as scalar metrics describing the performance of each model phenomenologically in connection with the corresponding specific physical process. Only two very high-resolution global climate models have a good agreement with reanalyses for both the global and the process-oriented metrics. Large biases, in several cases larger than 20%, are found in all the considered metrics between the wave climatologies of most IPCC models and the reanalyses, while the span of the climatologies of the various models is, in all cases, around 50%. In particular, the travelling baroclinic waves are typically overestimated by the climate models, while the planetary waves are usually underestimated, in agreement with what found is past analyses performed on global weather forecasting models. When comparing the results of similar models, it is apparent that in some cases the vertical resolution of the model atmosphere, the adopted ocean model, and the advection schemes seem to be critical in the bulk of the atmospheric variability. The models ensemble obtained by arithmetic averaging of the results of all models is biased with respect to the reanalyses but is comparable to the best five models. Nevertheless, the models results do not cluster around their ensemble mean. This study suggests caveats with respect to the ability of most of the presently available climate models in representing the statistical properties of the global scale atmospheric dynamics of the present climate and, a fortiori, in the perspective of modeling climate change.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the international modeling groups for providing their data for analysis, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for collecting and archiving the model data, the JSC/CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) and their Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and Climate Simulation Panel for organizing the model data analysis activity, and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support. The IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. A special thank to George Boer, Seita Emori, Silvio Gualdi, Kenneth Lo, Gavin Schmidt and Daniel Robitaille for supplying some of the datasets that, due to technical problems, were not available on the on the PCMDI servers when we were working on this paper. The authors are also grateful to F.W. Gerstengarbe, U. Böhm, M. Claussen, R. Pielke Sr., G. Browning, K. Fraederich, G. Russell, A. Tsonis, B. Hoskins, and L. Smith for encouragement and useful comments. We acknowledge the useful comments of two anonymous referees. V.L. acknowledges the support of ISAC-CNR and CINFAI (HYDROCARE project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Matematica ed Informatica, Università di Camerino, Camerino (MC), Italy

    Valerio Lucarini & Antonio Speranza

  2. Progetto Speciale Clima Globale, Ente Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e l’Ambiente, Rome, Italy

    Sandro Calmanti, Alessandro Dell’Aquila & Paolo M. Ruti

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  1. Valerio Lucarini
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  2. Sandro Calmanti
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Correspondence to Valerio Lucarini.

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Lucarini, V., Calmanti, S., Dell’Aquila, A. et al. Intercomparison of the northern hemisphere winter mid-latitude atmospheric variability of the IPCC models. Clim Dyn 28, 829–848 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-006-0213-x

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