Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models
Generations of climate models exhibit biases in their representation of North Atlantic storm tracks, which tend to be too far near the equator and too zonal. Additionally, models have difficulties simulating explosive cyclone growth. These biases are one of the reasons for the uncertainties in proje...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:10078369 2023-05-15T17:35:04+02:00 Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models Schemm, Sebastian 2023-02-02 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10078369/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 en eng John Wiley and Sons Inc. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10078369/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. J Adv Model Earth Syst Research Article Text 2023 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 2023-04-09T01:08:34Z Generations of climate models exhibit biases in their representation of North Atlantic storm tracks, which tend to be too far near the equator and too zonal. Additionally, models have difficulties simulating explosive cyclone growth. These biases are one of the reasons for the uncertainties in projections of future climate over Europe, and the underlying causes have yet to be determined. All three biases are shown to be related, and diabatic processes are pointed to as a likely cause. To demonstrate this, two hemispherically symmetric storm tracks forming downstream of an idealized sea surface temperature (SST) front on an aquaplanet are examined using the seamless ICOsahedral Non‐hydrostatic weather and climate model (ICON) and its grid refinement capabilities. The analyzed perpetual boreal winter has a global grid spacing of 20 km, two bi‐directionally interacting grid nests over the Northern Hemisphere that refine the grid to 10‐km spacing over much of the stormtrack and further to 5‐km spacing near the SST front. In contrast, no grid refinement is performed for the Southern Hemisphere. Feature‐based cyclone tracking shows that the poleward propagation in the NH is enhanced, so the high‐resolution storm track is less equatorward and less zonal; explosive deepening rates are more frequent and precipitation rates are amplified. The implication is that resolving diabatic processes on the storm scale improves all three intersecting biases in the representation of storm tracks. While new challenges arise at cloud resolving scales, much improvement for the representation of storm tracks will be gained once climate models resolve the meso‐γ scale. Text North Atlantic PubMed Central (PMC) Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 15 2 |
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Research Article Schemm, Sebastian Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
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Research Article |
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Generations of climate models exhibit biases in their representation of North Atlantic storm tracks, which tend to be too far near the equator and too zonal. Additionally, models have difficulties simulating explosive cyclone growth. These biases are one of the reasons for the uncertainties in projections of future climate over Europe, and the underlying causes have yet to be determined. All three biases are shown to be related, and diabatic processes are pointed to as a likely cause. To demonstrate this, two hemispherically symmetric storm tracks forming downstream of an idealized sea surface temperature (SST) front on an aquaplanet are examined using the seamless ICOsahedral Non‐hydrostatic weather and climate model (ICON) and its grid refinement capabilities. The analyzed perpetual boreal winter has a global grid spacing of 20 km, two bi‐directionally interacting grid nests over the Northern Hemisphere that refine the grid to 10‐km spacing over much of the stormtrack and further to 5‐km spacing near the SST front. In contrast, no grid refinement is performed for the Southern Hemisphere. Feature‐based cyclone tracking shows that the poleward propagation in the NH is enhanced, so the high‐resolution storm track is less equatorward and less zonal; explosive deepening rates are more frequent and precipitation rates are amplified. The implication is that resolving diabatic processes on the storm scale improves all three intersecting biases in the representation of storm tracks. While new challenges arise at cloud resolving scales, much improvement for the representation of storm tracks will be gained once climate models resolve the meso‐γ scale. |
format |
Text |
author |
Schemm, Sebastian |
author_facet |
Schemm, Sebastian |
author_sort |
Schemm, Sebastian |
title |
Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
title_short |
Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
title_full |
Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
title_fullStr |
Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
title_full_unstemmed |
Toward Eliminating the Decades‐Old “Too Zonal and Too Equatorward” Storm‐Track Bias in Climate Models |
title_sort |
toward eliminating the decades‐old “too zonal and too equatorward” storm‐track bias in climate models |
publisher |
John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
publishDate |
2023 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10078369/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 |
genre |
North Atlantic |
genre_facet |
North Atlantic |
op_source |
J Adv Model Earth Syst |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10078369/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 |
op_rights |
© 2023 The Authors. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1029/2022MS003482 |
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Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems |
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15 |
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2 |
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1766134110865063936 |