The consideration of North and Baltic Seas in regional climate modelling with the coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice model COSMO-CLM/NEMO

The main objective of this PhD work is to assess the impact of fine-scale air-sea interaction on the performance of a regional climate prediction model in marginal sea regions. Focus is on the North and Baltic Seas, the largest marginal sea area in the mid-latitudes. Motivation for this work is to b...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pham, Trang Van
Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50448
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-504488
http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/files/50448/Pham_2019_Doktorarbeit_Final.pdf
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Summary:The main objective of this PhD work is to assess the impact of fine-scale air-sea interaction on the performance of a regional climate prediction model in marginal sea regions. Focus is on the North and Baltic Seas, the largest marginal sea area in the mid-latitudes. Motivation for this work is to better understand the interaction between the different components of the climate system, namely atmosphere, ocean and sea-ice. In addition to that, the sea regions of interest, the North and Baltic Seas, are orographically complex and cannot be resolved by a global ocean model. The ice coverage on the Baltic Sea is underestimated in the stand-alone atmospheric model COSMO-CLM due to the low water freezing temperature value assumed, which is not applicable for such brackish water body. To fulfil the thesis goal, a new regional coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice system was developed for these two seas, named COSMO-CLM/NEMO. The two-way coupling system involves active feedback from both component models: the limited-area climate model COSMO-CLM and the regional ocean model NEMO-NORDIC. The coupled system COSMO-CLM/NEMO for the North and Baltic Seas was used to study the impact of sea surface temperature and sea ice on the atmosphere on diffrent topics. The long term impact of the North and Baltic Seas was studied through 15- year long simulations driven by European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Interim reanalysis (ERA-Interim) data. Furthermore, to see whether the marginal sea modelling can advance the simulation of extreme climate events, the coupled model was used to reproduce six extreme snowband phenomena over the Baltic Sea in simulations driven by ERA-interim data. Last but not least, the role of the North and Baltic Sea model in improving long-term regional climate prediction was examined. Two sets of experiments with coupled and uncoupled models, each set has five independent decadal hindcasts forced by global climate model, were carried out. All results were compared with observations and the ...