A world without Greenland: impacts on the Northern Hemisphere winter circulation in low- and highresolution models

• Main Authors: M. M. Junge, Æ R. Blender, Æ K. Fraedrich, Æ V. Gayler, U. Luksch, Æ F. Lunkeit
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Greenland; Iceland; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.463.5506; http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:994959:1/component/escidoc:994958/ClimDyn_24-297.pdf

Abstract To investigate the effect of Greenland’s orog-raphy on the northern hemisphere winter circulation experiments with an atmospheric GCM are conducted: a perturbed integration where standard orography is reduced to sea level in the Greenland area is compared to a standard orography control integration. The out-come of these experiments suggests that the existence of high mountains at Greenland causes a reinforcement of the stationary wave field in the Atlantic sector, colder temperatures to the west of Greenland and warmer temperatures to the east and south, over the North Atlantic. The impact on the flow field cannot be understood in the framework of standing Rossby waves, but it indicates a resonance between remotely forced stationary waves and local (thermo-) dynamics. The pattern of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), in particular the northern centre, lies further to the east in the flat-Greenland experiment compared to the control run and the observations. Together with the fact that the climatological low-pressure system around Iceland hardly shifts, this suggests that the location of the NAO is not necessarily tied to the time mean pressure distributions. Considering the model resolu-tion as a parameter, experiments with a high resolution (T106) suggest that the near-field changes are repre-sented sufficiently by a T42 resolution, a standard res-olution used in state-of-the-art coupled climate models. In contrast, far-field changes depend critically on model resolution. Hemispheric circulation and temperature changes differ substantially from low to high resolution, and generalized statements about the impact of Greenland’s orography cannot be made. 1