Abstract
We present an atmosphere–ocean regional climate model for the Mediterranean basin, called the PROTHEUS system, composed by the regional climate model RegCM3 as the atmospheric component and by a regional configuration of the MITgcm model as the oceanic component. The model is applied to an area encompassing the Mediterranean Sea and compared to a stand-alone version of its atmospheric component. An assessment of the model performances is done by using available observational datasets. Despite a persistent bias, the PROTHEUS system is able to capture the inter-annual variability of seasonal sea surface temperature (SST) and also the fine scale spatio-temporal evolution of observed SST anomalies, with spatial correlation as high as 0.7 during summer. The close inspection of a 10-day strong wind event during the summer of 2000 proves the capability of the PROTHEUS system to correctly describe the daily evolution of SST under strong air–sea interaction conditions. As a consequence of the model’s skill in reproducing observed SST and wind fields, we expect a reliable estimation of air–sea fluxes. The model skill in reproducing climatological land surface fields is in line with that of state of the art regional climate models.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for very useful suggestions and comments. We thank the JPL PO.DAAC that makes the QuikSCAT data freely available. The ECMWF ERA-40 data have been obtained from the ECMWF data server at http://data.ecmwf.int/data/. The HOAPS latent heat fluxes were obtained from the CERA database (http://cera-www.dkrz.de/CERA/). The GPCP-1DD data were provided by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory for Atmospheres, which develops and computes the 1DD as a contribution to the GEWEX Global Precipitation Climatology Project. Reformatted CRU TS 2.1 data downloaded from CGIAR-CSI at: http://cru.csi.cgiar.org. This work is partially funded by CIRCE-EU project. (EU Project No. 036961.)
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Artale, V., Calmanti, S., Carillo, A. et al. An atmosphere–ocean regional climate model for the Mediterranean area: assessment of a present climate simulation. Clim Dyn 35, 721–740 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0691-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0691-8