Simulation of South American wintertime climate with a nesting system

Abstract

A numerical nesting system is developed to simulate wintertime climate of the eastern South Pacific-South America-western South Atlantic region, and preliminary results are presented. The nesting system consists of a large-scale global atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) and a regional climate model (RCM). The latter is driven at its boundaries by the GCM. The particularity of this nesting system is that the GCM itself has a variable horizontal resolution (stretched grid). Our main purpose is to assess the plausibility of such a technique to improve climate representation over South America. In order to evaluate how this nesting system represents the main features of the regional circulation, several mean fields have been analyzed. The global model, despite its relatively low resolution, could simulate reasonably well the more significant large-scale circulation patterns. The use of the regional model often results in improvements, but not universally. Many of the systematic errors of the global model are also present in the regional model, although the biases tend to be rectified. Our preliminary results suggest that nesting technique is a computationally low-cost alternative for simulating regional climate features. However, additional simulations, parametrizations tuning and further diagnosis are clearly needed to represent local patterns more precisely.