Can climate models simulate the atmospheric heat budget and does it matter? — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Can climate models simulate the atmospheric heat budget and does it matter?

Can climate models simulate the atmospheric heat budget and does it matter? (#251)

Christian Jakob ¹

School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The atmospheric heat budget and precipitation are known to be tightly linked on large scales. In recent work we showed that modern satellite-based observations and reanalyses can be combined to derive this budget to first order even on daily time-scales. We showed that the balance of atmospheric radiative cooling and precipitation is non-local and is facilitated through the global circulation, with regions of strong diabatic cooling found in the subtropics and regions of reduced cooling in the precipitating tropics. This opens the intriguing possibility that model errors in precipitation are the result of errors in the radiation budget away from the precipitating regions.

In this study we use AMIP simulations from a number CMIP models to investigate their realism in simulating the atmospheric heat budget and possible consequences for their simulation of precipitation. We show that while the overall radiative cooling of the models matches that of the observations to a fair degree, this is the result of an underestimation of both the long wave cooling and shortwave heating. We investigate possible consequences of these compensating error on model performance.

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Authors contributing to this abstract.

Jakob, C

Professor Jakob was awarded his PhD in Meteorology from the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich in 2001. As Research and Senior Research Scientist for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts from 1993 to 2001, he worked on the development and evaluation of parameterizations for clouds, convection and precipitation. From 2002 to 2007 he was Senior and Principal Research Scientist of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and since 2007 has been a professor at Monash University. He currently holds the Chair of Climate Modelling at Monash’s School of Mathematical Sciences and he is the current Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. Professor Jakob’s experience and current interests are in the development and evaluation of the hydrological cycle in global atmospheric models. Internationally, he is engaged in many scientific and collaborative activities. He is the current Co-chair of the World Climate Research Programme’s Modeling Advisory Council. He led the prestigious Working Group on Numerical Experimentation from 2008 to 2012 and was the first university-based researcher to be appointed in that position, in which he is coordinating research within WCRP on the evaluation and development of the representation of the energy and water cycles in global models. He was Chair of the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP) Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Modelling and Prediction Panel from 2007 to 2010. As recognition of his prominent position in the climate science field, Professor Jakob was a lead author for the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (Working Group 1).

Can climate models simulate the atmospheric heat budget and does it matter? (#251)

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