Estimation of the Future Distribution of Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Using the CMIP3 Multi-model Ensemble Mean

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.518.6200; http://www.mri-jma.go.jp/Publish/Technical/DATA/VOL_56/tec_rep_mri_56.pdf

Future global climate change has been assessed in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4) with higher confidence than in previous reports by using state-of-the-art atmosphere–ocean coupled general circulation models (AOGCM), which have been developed at institutions worldwide and made available under Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) as an activity of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). The performance of AOGCMs in reproducing historical and present climate has been improved, and the ensemble average of the multi-model results gives the best performance in many aspects. It has now been recognized that global warming is inevitable unless urgent countermeasures are implemented, and the current emphasis is on the mitigation of the effects of global warming. For this purpose, more precise and detailed information (both spatial and temporal) of future climate change is needed. Such information can be obtained most effectively from atmospheric models with much higher resolution than that of the AOGCMs used for long-term projection. Bottom boundary data (sea surface temperature and sea ice distribution) for the present and future climate must be specified in such "time-slice " simulations. In time-slice simulations, it is essential for the bottom boundary data to be