Temperature biases in modeled polar climate and adoption of physical parameterization schemes

• Main Authors: Xiying, Liu, Jiahua, Zhao, Huasheng, Xia, Tonggui, Bai, Tao, Zhang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Polar Research Institute of China - PRIC 2012
• Subjects: Atmosphere; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Advances in Polar Science; albedo; Polar Science; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://library.arcticportal.org/2445/; http://library.arcticportal.org/2445/1/A20120106.pdf

An annual cycle of atmospheric variations for 1989 in the Arctic has been simulated with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. A severe cold bias was found around a cold center in surface air temperature over the Arctic Ocean, compared with results from ERA-Interim reanalysis. Four successive numerical experiments have been carried out to find out the reasons for this. The results show that the sea ice albedo scheme has the biggest influence in summer, and the effect of the cloud microphysics scheme is significant in both summer and winter. The effect of phase transition between ice and water has the biggest influence over the region near the sea ice edge in summer, and contributes little to improvement of the severe cold bias. The original crude albedo parameterization in the surface process scheme is the main reason for the large simulated cold bias of the cold center in summer. With a different land surface scheme than in the control run, cold biases of simulated surface air temperature over the Arctic Ocean are greatly reduced, by as much as 10 K, implying that the land surface scheme is critical for polar climate simulation.