Biases of the wintertime Arctic Oscillation in CMIP5 models

• Published in: Environmental Research Letters
• Main Authors: Hainan Gong, Lin Wang, Wen Chen, Xiaolong Chen, Debashis Nath
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 2016
• Subjects: Arctic Oscillation (AO); CMIP5; North Pacific; Pacific-North America (PNA); empirical orthogonal function (EOF); Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering; TD1-1066; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Science; Q; Physics; QC1-999; Arctic; Pacific
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/12/1/014001; https://doaj.org/article/fb7b2e0744c440669b974fbc3f5b14d6

Distinct biases are found in the pattern and teleconnections of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) in 32 climate models that participate the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Compared with observations, the Pacific (Atlantic) center of AO is excessively strong (weak) in most of the 32 CMIP5 models, and the AO-related surface air temperature anomalies are generally weak over the Eurasian continent and North America. These biases are closely tied to the excessively strong linkage, which is marginal in observations, between AO and the North Pacific mode (NPM)—the leading variability of the North Pacific sea level pressure. It implies that the AO in CMIP5 models may be compounded with some regional mode over the North Pacific. Accordingly, a bias-correction method was proposed via correcting the AO index (AOI) to improve the diagnostic estimates of the AO teleconnections. The results suggest that the biases in the pattern and teleconnections of AO can be significantly reduced when the NPM variability is linearly removed from the AOI.