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Evolution of model systematic errors in the Tropical Atlantic Basin from coupled climate hindcasts

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Abstract

Significant systematic errors in the tropical Atlantic Ocean are common in state-of-the-art coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation models. In this study, a set of ensemble hindcasts from the NCEP coupled forecast system (CFS) is used to examine the initial growth of the coupled model bias. These CFS hindcasts are 9-month integrations starting from perturbed real-time oceanic and atmospheric analyses for 1981–2003. The large number of integrations from a variety of initial states covering all months provides a good opportunity to examine how the model systematic errors grow. The monthly climatologies of ensemble hindcasts from various initial months are compared with both observed and analyzed oceanic and atmospheric datasets. Our analyses show that two error patterns are dominant in the hindcasts. One is the warming of the sea surface temperature (SST) in the southeastern tropical Atlantic Ocean. This error grows faster in boreal summer and fall and peaks in November–December at round 2°C in the open ocean. It is caused by an excessive model surface shortwave radiative flux in this region, especially from boreal summer to fall. The excessive radiative forcing is in turn caused by the CFS inability to reproduce the observed amount of low cloud cover in the southeastern ocean and its seasonal increase. According to a comparison between the seasonal climatologies from the CFS hindcasts and a long-term simulation of the atmospheric model forced with observed SST, the CFS low cloud and radiation errors are inherent to its atmospheric component. On the other hand, the SST error in CFS is a major cause of the model’s southward bias of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) in boreal winter and spring. An analysis of the SST errors of the 6-month ensemble hindcasts by seven coupled models in the Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction project shows that this SST error pattern is common in coupled climate hindcasts. The second error pattern is an excessive deepening of the model thermocline depth to the north of the equator from the western coast toward the central ocean. This error grows fastest in boreal summer. It is forced by an overly strong local anticyclonic surface wind stress curl and is in turn related to the weakened northeast trade winds in summer and fall. The thermocline error in the northwest delays the annual shoaling of the equatorial thermocline in the Gulf of Guinea remotely through the equatorial waveguide.

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Notes

  1. A mean net heat flux (67 W/m2) is subtracted because it does not contribute to the annual cycle of the heat content.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Environmental Modeling Center at NCEP for generously providing the CFS hindcast dataset and the DEMETER project for providing the multi-model ensemble hindcast data. The availability of these original data makes this study possible. We thank Drs. J. Shukla and J. L. Kinter III for their support of this research and Dr. D. Straus for his valuable comments and suggestions on the manuscript. We are also grateful to Drs. J. Zhou, S. Yang, and V. Misra for useful discussions and Dr. E. Manzini and three anonymous reviewers for very constructive suggestions. The funding for B. Huang and Z.-Z. Hu is provided by NOAA’s CLIVAR Atlantic Program (NA04OAR4310115).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Climate Dynamics, College of Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Bohua Huang

  2. Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Institute of Global Environment and Society, Calverton, MD, 20705, USA

    Bohua Huang & Zeng-Zhen Hu

  3. RSIS/Climate Prediction Center, National Centers for Environmental Prediction/NOAA, Camp Springs, MD, 20746, USA

    Bhaskar Jha

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  1. Bohua Huang
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Correspondence to Bohua Huang.

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Huang, B., Hu, ZZ. & Jha, B. Evolution of model systematic errors in the Tropical Atlantic Basin from coupled climate hindcasts. Clim Dyn 28, 661–682 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-006-0223-8

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