Ensemble reconstruction of the atmospheric column from surface pressure using analogues

Climate Dynamics volume 41, pages1333–1344(2013)Cite this article

Abstract

We present a statistical method to reconstruct continuous atmospheric fields on various pressure levels, given a constraint at the surface. The method is based on analogues of circulation and taking into consideration the time sequence of the analogues. The method is tested on the 2001–2011 period, with an emphasis on the year 2010. We base the atmospheric reconstruction on reanalysis data from 1948 to 2000, and use a constraint of sea-level pressure for 2001–2011. The pattern correlation scores appear to be significant most of the time, although score flaws are occasionally detected. Those flaws are mainly due to the time continuity constraint that is imposed on the reconstruction, which lowers the possibility of finding matching analogues. This method offers an ensemble of atmospheric reconstructions, and presents a computationally cheap alternative to data assimilation for a climate model, although with lower scores.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the French ANR CHEDAR project. PY acknowledges the hospitality of AORI (University of Tokyo), which helped developing some of the ideas of the manuscript. All computations were done with the R language. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped to improve significantly the manuscript.

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Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, UMR CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Pascal Yiou, Tamara Salameh, Robert Vautard & Mathieu Vrac

  2. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, UMR CNRS-UPMC-ENS-X, Palaiseau, France

    Philippe Drobinski & Laurent Menut

Authors
  1. Pascal Yiou
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  2. Tamara Salameh
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  3. Philippe Drobinski
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  4. Laurent Menut
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  5. Robert Vautard
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  6. Mathieu Vrac
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Correspondence to Pascal Yiou.

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Yiou, P., Salameh, T., Drobinski, P. et al. Ensemble reconstruction of the atmospheric column from surface pressure using analogues. Clim Dyn 41, 1333–1344 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1626-3

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Keywords

  • Circulation analogues
  • Climate reconstructions
  • North Atlantic variability