Impact Of Dynamical Core And Diurnal Atmosphere Occean Coupling On Simulation Of Tropical Rainfall In CAM 3.1, AGCM

Abstract

In first part of the study we discuss impact of dynamical core in simulation of tropical rainfall. Over years many new dynamical cores have been developed for atmospheric models to increase efficiency and reduce numerical errors. CAM3.1 gives an opportunity to study the impact of the dynamical core on simulations with its three dynamical cores namely Eulerian spectral(EUL) , Semilagrangian dynamics(SLD) and Finite volume(FV) coupled to a single parametrization package. A past study has compared dynamical cores of CAM3 in terms on tracer transport and has showed advantages using FV in terms of tracer transport. In this study we compare the dynamical cores in climate simulations and at their optimal configuration, which is the intended use of the model. The model is forced with AMIP type SST and rainfall over seasonal, interannual scales is compared. The significant differences in simulation of seasonal mean exist over tropics and over monsoon regions with observations and among dynamical cores. The differences among EUL and SLD, which use spectral transform methods are lesser compared that of with FV clearly indicating role of numerics in differences. There exist major errors in simulation of seasonal cycle in all dynamical cores and errors in simulation of seasonal means over many regions are associated with errors in simulation of seasonal cycle such as over south china sea. Seasonal cycle in FV is weaker compared to SLD and EUL. The dynamical cores exhibit different interannual variability of rainfall over Indian monsoon region, the period of maximum power corresponding to a dynamical core differs substantially with another. From this study there seems no superiority associated with FV dynamical core over all climate scales as seen in tracer transport. The next part of the study deals with impact of diurnal ocean atmosphere coupling in an AGCM,CAM3.1. Due to relatively low magnitude of diurnal cycle of SST and lack of SST observations over diurnal scales current atmospheric models are forced with SSTs of periods grater than a day. CAM 3.1 standalone model is forced with monthly SSTs but the interpolation is linear to every time step between any two months and this linear interpolation implies a linear diurnal and intraseasonal variation of SST which is not true in nature. To test the sensitivity of CAM3.1 to coupling of SST on diurnal scales, we prescribed over tropics(20S20N) a diurnal cycle of SST over daily mean interpolated SST of different magnitudes and phase comparable to observations. This idea of using a diurnal cycle of SST retaining seasonal mean SST in an atmospheric model is novel and provides an interesting frame work to test sensitivity of model to interpolations used in coupling of boundary conditions. Our analysis shows a high impact of using diurnal cycle of SST on simulation of mean rainfall over tropics. The impact in a case where diurnal cycle of SST is fixed and retained to daily mean SST implies that changes associated with a coupled model are to some extent due to change in representation of diurnal cycle of SST. A decrease of excess rainfall over western coast of Bay of Bengal and an increase of rainfall over northern bay of Bengal in such case is similar to the improvement due to coupling atmospheric model to a slab ocean model. This also implies that problems with current AMIP models in simulation of seasonal mean Indian monsoon rainfall could be due to erroneous representation of diurnal cycle of SST in models over this region where the diurnal cycle of SST is high in observations. The high spatial variability of the impact in various cases over tropics implies that a similar spatial variation of diurnal cycle could be important for accurate simulation of rainfall over tropics. Preliminary analysis shows that impact on rainfall was due to changes in moisture convergence. We also hypothesized that diurnal cycle of SST could trigger convection over regions such as northern Bay of Bengal and rainfall convergence feedback sustains it. The impact was also found on simulation of internal interannual variability of rainfall