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Published November 2022 | public
Journal Article

Mitigating climate biases in the midlatitude North Atlantic by increasing model resolution: SST gradients and their relation to blocking and the jet

Abstract

Starting to resolve the oceanic mesoscale in climate models is a step change in model fidelity. This study examines how certain obstinate biases in the midlatitude North Atlantic respond to increasing resolution (from 1° to 0.25° in the ocean) and how such biases in sea surface temperature (SST) affect the atmosphere. Using a multi-model ensemble of historical climate simulations run at different horizontal resolutions, it is shown that a severe cold SST bias in the central North Atlantic, common to many ocean models, is significantly reduced with increasing resolution. The associated bias in the time-mean meridional SST gradient is shown to relate to a positive bias in low-level baroclinicity, while the cold SST bias causes biases also in static stability and diabatic heating in the interior of the atmosphere. The changes in baroclinicity and diabatic heating brought by increasing resolution lead to improvements in European blocking and eddy-driven jet variability. Across the multi-model ensemble a clear relationship is found between the climatological meridional SST gradients in the broader Gulf Stream Extension area and two aspects of the atmospheric circulation: the frequency of high-latitude blocking and the southern-jet regime. This relationship is thought to reflect the two-way interaction (with a positive feedback) between the respective oceanic and atmospheric anomalies. These North Atlantic SST anomalies are shown to be important in forcing significant responses in the midlatitude atmospheric circulation, including jet variability and the stormtrack. Further increases in oceanic and atmospheric resolution are expected to lead to additional improvements in the representation of Euro-Atlantic climate.

Additional Information

PJA and AB acknowledge funding from the PRIMAVERA project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme under Grant Agreement 641727. MR acknowledges support from the Joint U.K. BEIS/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (Grant GA01101). N-E. Omrani was supported by 1) the Bjerknes Climate Prediction Unit with funding from the Trond Mohn Foundation (Grant BFS2018TMT01) and 2) the RCN-funded ROADMAP project (316618) under a joint JPI Climate and JPI Ocean call. PA acknowledges funding also from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) through the JPI Oceans and JPI Climate "Next Generation Climate Science in Europe for Oceans" ROADMAP Project (D.M. 593/2016). Finally, the authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that greatly improved the original manuscript. Data availability statement. All data from PRIMAVERA HighResMIP simulations used in this study are available from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). ERA5, ERA-40, and ERA-Interim reanalysis data are available from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). The HadISST2 high-resolution SST data used (1950–2014) are available from the ESGF (https://doi.org/10.22033/ESGF/input4MIPs.1221). The OAFlux data used in this study are available from the Research Data Archive of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR; https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds260.1).

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023