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Impacts of SST configuration on monthly prediction of western North Pacific summer monsoon in coupled and uncoupled models

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Abstract

This study examines the impacts of sea surface temperature (SST) configuration on the monthly prediction of summer monsoon over the western North Pacific (WNP) by conducting several sets of hindcast experiments using the Beijing Climate Center Climate System Model and its atmospheric component model. The results show that the atmosphere-only model exhibits limited skill in predicting the WNP monsoon rainfall and circulation, and this skill can hardly be improved by simply increasing the frequency of prescribed SST observation. Compared to the atmosphere-only model, the coupled model shows much better performance in predicting the WNP monsoon rainfall and circulation, which can be further improved by adopting the observed SST with relatively higher frequency in the model initialization. This indicates that the high frequency of observed SST used is much more important in the coupled model than in the uncoupled model. In addition, the uncoupled model forced by the SST predicted by coupled model tends to produce better prediction of WNP monsoon rainfall and circulation than that forced by the observed SST. Both the coupled model and the atmosphere-only model forced by the coupled model predicted SST can well reproduce the surface latent heat flux and shortwave radiation flux over the WNP, leading to a reasonable SST-monsoon relationship and thus skillful predictions of WNP monsoon. Therefore, although the Tier-1 approach based on coupled model is increasingly popular, the Tier-2 approach based on atmosphere-only model is still feasible for the monthly prediction of WNP summer monsoon despite the lack of air-sea interaction. To obtain more skillful Tier-2 prediction, we recommend seeking for SST forcing that is unrealistic but consistent with the atmospheric model rather than SST forcing with very high accuracy.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 42075161, 41975081, 41675090, and 41875004), the program B for Outstanding PhD candidate of Nanjing University (No. 202101B042), the CAS “Light of West China” Program (E12903010, Y929641001), the Jiangsu University “Blue Project” outstanding young teachers training object, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change. We appreciate the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions to significantly improve the quality of our manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CMA-NJU Joint Laboratory for Climate Prediction Studies and State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather and Joint Center for Atmospheric Radar Research of CMA/NJU, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, No. 163 Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Xueyan Zhu, Anning Huang & Jian Yuan

  2. National Climate Center, and CMA-NJU Joint Laboratory for Climate Prediction Studies, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiangwen Liu

  3. Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters/Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Weitao Deng

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  1. Xueyan Zhu
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  4. Jian Yuan
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Correspondence to Xiangwen Liu or Anning Huang.

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Zhu, X., Liu, X., Huang, A. et al. Impacts of SST configuration on monthly prediction of western North Pacific summer monsoon in coupled and uncoupled models. Clim Dyn 59, 1687–1702 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-06063-6

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