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An atmosphere–ocean regional climate model for the Mediterranean area: assessment of a present climate simulation

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ACS-CLIM MOD, ENEA, Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment, Bldg F19, Room 112 Sp. 91 CR Casaccia, Via Anguillarese 301, 00060, Santa Maria di Galeria, Rome, Italy

    Vincenzo Artale, Sandro Calmanti, Adriana Carillo, Alessandro Dell’Aquila, Marine Herrmann, Giovanna Pisacane, Paolo M. Ruti, Gianmaria Sannino & Maria Vittoria Struglia

  2. Abdus Salam ICTP, Trieste, Italy

    Filippo Giorgi, Xunqiang Bi, Jeremy S. Pal & Sara Rauscher

  3. CNRM, Météo-France, Toulouse, France

    Marine Herrmann

  4. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jeremy S. Pal

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  1. Vincenzo Artale
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  2. Sandro Calmanti
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  3. Adriana Carillo
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  4. Alessandro Dell’Aquila
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  5. Marine Herrmann
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Correspondence to Sandro Calmanti or Alessandro Dell’Aquila.

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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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