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Assessment of the potential of CMIP6 models in simulating the sea surface temperature variability over the tropical Indian Ocean

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Abstract

The ability of Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) in simulating the seasonal and interannual sea surface temperature (SST) variability is evaluated over the tropical Indian Ocean (IO). The historical simulations of eleven CMIP6 models are compared with the observations and standard reference data (Extended Reconstructed SST from 1950 to 2014 and the RAMA buoy) for evaluation purpose. Present analysis shows that most of the models exhibit warm SST bias over the equatorial IO in all seasons whereas MPI-ESM1-2-HAM and MPI-ESM1-2 LR exhibit cold SST bias over the entire IO in all seasons. Out of the 11 models, MPI-ESM1-2-HR, CanESM5, and IPSL-CM6A-LR show less bias over the western Arabian Sea compared to other models suggesting their better ability to capture the upwelling phenomena during the summer monsoon season which mainly drives the phytoplankton bloom over this region. Statistical analysis reveals that all the models perform reasonably well over the Arabian Sea and southern IO. The CanESM5 and IPSL-CM6A-LR perform better over the Bay of Bengal compared to all other models. The analysis of the leading modes of climate variability over the tropical IO suggests that the models are able to represent the Indian Ocean Basin mode more realistically than the Indian Ocean Dipole mode. The entire tropical IO exhibits a warming trend of about 0.018 °C/year estimated from the observation and a comparison shows that although all the models simulate this trend, the rate of warming simulated by CESM2-WACCM, CanESM5, and IPSL-CM6A-LR is close to the observed value.

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Availability of data and material

All the datasets used in the present study are available in the public domain and the sources are mentioned in the acknowledgments.

Code availability

The codes used for the processing of data can be provided on request to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Group Head MASD, Dean (A), and Director IIRS for providing support to carry out the present research. The ERSST data obtained from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/extended-reconstructed-sea-surface-temperature-ersst-v5 and the RAMA buoy SST data from https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/drupal/disdel/ are gratefully acknowledged. The authors acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and the authors thank the climate modeling groups listed in Table 1 of this paper for producing and making available their model output (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped to improve the original manuscript.

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  1. Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 248001, India

    Biswarup Bhattacharya, Sachiko Mohanty & Charu Singh

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  1. Biswarup Bhattacharya
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Biswarup Bhattacharya: methodology, visualization, analysis, writing-original draft and editing. Sachiko Mohanty: conceptualization, methodology, analysis, writing-review and editing. Charu Singh: conceptualization, methodology, analysis, writing-review and editing.

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Correspondence to Sachiko Mohanty.

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Bhattacharya, B., Mohanty, S. & Singh, C. Assessment of the potential of CMIP6 models in simulating the sea surface temperature variability over the tropical Indian Ocean. Theor Appl Climatol 148, 585–602 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03952-6

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