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Storm track response to ocean fronts in a global high-resolution climate model

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Abstract

Synoptic atmospheric eddies are affected by lower tropospheric air-temperature gradients and by turbulent heat fluxes from the surface. In this study we examine how ocean fronts affect these quantities and hence the storm tracks. We focus on two midlatitude regions where ocean fronts lie close to the storm tracks: the north-west Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. An atmospheric climate model of reasonably high resolution (~50 km) is applied in a climate-length (60 year) simulation in order to obtain stable statistics. Simulations with frontal structure in the sea surface temperature (SST) in one of the regions are compared against simulations with globally smoothed SST. We show that in both regions the ocean fronts have a strong influence on the transient eddy heat and moisture fluxes, not just in the boundary layer, but also in the free troposphere. Local differences in these quantities between the simulations reach 20–40 % of the maximum values in the simulation with smoothed SST. Averaged over the entire region of the storm track over the ocean the corresponding differences are 10–20 %. The effect on the transient eddy meridional wind variance is strong in the boundary layer but relatively weak above that. The potential mechanisms by which the ocean fronts influence the storm tracks are discussed, and our results are compared against previous studies with regional models, Aquaplanet models, and coarse resolution coupled models.

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Notes

  1. The smoother does a weighted average of the central point (given a weight of 1/3) and nearest 8 points (each with a weight of 1/12).

  2. In our experiments near–surface stability anomalies, and sensible heat flux anomalies overly SST anomalies, see Sect. 5.1.

  3. The more recent study of Ogawa et al. (2012) alleviates this issue by using more conservative adjustments to the realistic SST profile.

  4. Independent calculations by Dr. Y.-O. Kwon (WHOI) using MERRA reanalysis data confirmed that the zonal eddy heat flux effect on the divergence is negligible in the synoptic band, but it does become important for longer timescale intraseasonal variability.

  5. Swanson and Pierrehumbert (1997) deduce Querya corresponding eddy mixing length of about 4° to 5° latitude in the North Pacific.

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Acknowledgments

Two anonymous reviewers are thanked for their constructive comments and specifically for suggesting the decomposition of eddy heat flux (Sect. 6.1), and the temperature budget (Sect. 5.3). The authors gratefully acknowledge discussions with Hisashi Nakamura, Jimmy Booth, Young-Oh Kwon, Mike Alexander, Dima Smirnov, and Stuart Bishop. John Fasullo provided ERA-Interim and MERRA data. This work was part funded by Department Of Energy Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing project DE-SC0006743.

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  1. Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO, 80305, USA

    R. Justin Small, Robert A. Tomas & Frank O. Bryan

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  1. R. Justin Small
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Correspondence to R. Justin Small.

Appendix: comparison of different filtering bands

Appendix: comparison of different filtering bands

A comparison of storm track statistics for the N. Atlantic in DJF for different filter methods is shown in Fig. 19. Figures 19a, b) show the near-surface meridional wind variance from the ATL CAM run, for sub-5 days and sub-90 days filters respectively. It can be seen that the high variance follows the Gulf Stream in both filter types: the main differences are that the broader filter contains higher variability everywhere (as expected from a broader sampling of the frequency spectrum), and also that the variance in sub-polar latitudes becomes more important in the broader filter. In another comparison, we show ERA-I statistics at 850 hPa for meridional wind variance (Fig. 19c, d) and heat flux (Fig. 19e, f). The results are similar: the sub-90 days filter has larger values everywhere but the location of the mid-latitude extremum (north-east of Newfoundland for wind variance, south-east of Newfoundland for heat flux) are little changed for the different filter types. In the main text, comparisons are always made between CAM and observations using the same or similar filter band, where the increasing energy between 5 days cut-off and 90 days cut-off is not important. Further, inspection of Fig. 19 reveals that the synoptic (sub-5 days) variance in the midlatitude extrema is about 2/3 of the corresponding variance in the 90 days filter, justifying our use of 90 days filter as a guide to synoptic variability in those regions.

Fig. 19
figure 19

Comparison of “synoptic” (left panels, sub-5 days) and “intraseasonal” (right panels, sub-90 days) eddy statistics. a, b Near-surface meridional eddy wind variance, ATL experiment. c, d 850 hPa meridional eddy wind variance in ERA-I. e, f 850 hPa meridional eddy heat flux in ERA-I

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Similar conclusions were also found for the Southern Ocean (not shown).

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Small, R.J., Tomas, R.A. & Bryan, F.O. Storm track response to ocean fronts in a global high-resolution climate model. Clim Dyn 43, 805–828 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1980-9

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