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Atmospheric teleconnection associated with the Atlantic multidecadal variability in summer: assessment of the CESM1 model

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Abstract

Observational analysis shows that the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV) is associated with climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere through a zonal atmospheric teleconnection extending from the North Atlantic Ocean and propagating eastward around the Northern Hemisphere. We studied the fidelity of model simulations in reproducing the observed summer AMV and the associated impacts on the mid-latitude climate by analysing simulations using the National Centre for Atmospheric Research Community Earth System Model Version 1 (CESM1), including CESM1 North Atlantic idealized and pacemaker simulations, CESM1 large ensemble twentieth century uninitialized simulations and large ensemble initialized CESM1 decadal predictions. To further compare the fidelity of CESM1, we also analysed large ensemble simulations from three other models. Our results suggest that the uninitialized large ensemble simulations from all models can produce an AMV time evolution and its regional climate impacts similar to the observations to certain degree. By initializing the observed oceanic condition in decadal prediction simulations, the simulated AMV and its regional impacts are closer to the observed ones than those in uninitialized ensemble simulations. In addition, the pacemaker simulations that nudged the time-evolving observed North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies produce spatiotemporal characteristics of the AMV and AMV climate impacts closer to the observed ones than the uninitialized simulations. We conclude that although coupled models can produce AMV and its regional impacts similar to observed, proper initialization and bias correction of the sea surface temperature spatial and temporal structure can improve this capability.

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Availability of data and material

All data used in this study are publicly available. The CESM1 large ensemble simulations, North Atlantic idealized and pacemaker simulations, and MMLEA simulations are accessible via the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Climate Data Gateway, and the observational data are available through the respective institutions.

Code availability

The figures were created by using the NCAR Command Language (http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and significantly improving the manuscript. D. Si, D. Jiang and X. Lang were jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 41875104), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program of China (Grant 2019QZKK0101), and Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA20100304). A. Hu was supported by the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) via National Science Foundation IA 1844590. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and resources from the Climate Simulation Laboratory at NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and other agencies. We also acknowledge the CESM1 large ensemble community project, North Atlantic idealized and pacemaker ensemble simulations and multi-model large ensemble archive project.

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  1. Climate Change Research Center, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Dong Si, Dabang Jiang & Xianmei Lang

  2. Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Dong Si

  3. Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, 80307, USA

    Aixue Hu

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DS made the calculations and created the figures. AH, DJ, DS and XL contributed to the interpreting results and writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Dong Si or Aixue Hu.

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Si, D., Hu, A., Jiang, D. et al. Atmospheric teleconnection associated with the Atlantic multidecadal variability in summer: assessment of the CESM1 model. Clim Dyn 60, 1043–1060 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06331-z

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