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Climate variability attributable to terrestrial and oceanic forcing in the NCAR CAM3-CLM3 Models

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Abstract

Based on numerical experiments using the NCAR CAM3-CLM3 models, this paper examines the impact of soil moisture, vegetation, and sea surface temperature (SST) on the inter-annual variability of climate over land. For each element, two experiments are carried out, with the inter-annual variability preserved in one experiment and eliminated in the other. Differences in the standard deviation of the precipitation and air temperature at the inter-annual time scale are used to quantify the impacts from soil moisture dynamics, vegetation dynamics, and oceanic forcing. The impact of oceanic forcing is mainly limited to the Tropics, with the strongest signal in the equatorial zone, and moisture convergence is the key linkage between SST forcing and tropical precipitation. Soil moisture plays a significant role in climate variability during the rainy seasons of all semi-arid regions (which is consistent with many previous studies), and during the dry seasons of the humid Amazon. Evapotranspiration is identified as the main mechanism linking precipitation variability to soil moisture. Amazon is the only region where vegetation dynamics has a significant influence on precipitation variability. However, the impact of vegetation dynamics on temperature is strong over the US Great Plains in all four seasons and in the Amazon region during the dry and dry-to-wet transition seasons.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported from funding from NSF (ATM 0531845) and NOAA (NA080AR4310871). The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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  1. Shanshan Sun

    Present address: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Shanshan Sun & Guiling Wang

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  1. Shanshan Sun
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  2. Guiling Wang
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Correspondence to Guiling Wang.

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Sun, S., Wang, G. Climate variability attributable to terrestrial and oceanic forcing in the NCAR CAM3-CLM3 Models. Clim Dyn 42, 2067–2078 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1913-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1913-7

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