Authors: Hosmay Lopez Ben P Kirtman
Publish Date: 2014/06/26
Volume: 44, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 509-527
Abstract
A noise reduction technique namely the interactive ensemble IE approach is adopted to reduce noise at the air–sea interface due to internal atmospheric dynamics in a stateoftheart coupled general circulation model CGCM The IE technique uses multiple realization of atmospheric general circulation models coupled to a single ocean general circulation model The ensembles mean fluxes from the atmospheric simulations are communicated to the ocean component Each atmospheric simulation receives the same SST coming from the ocean component The only difference among the atmospheric simulations comes from perturbed initial conditions thus the atmospheric states are in principle synoptically independent The IE technique can be used to better understand the importance of weather noise forcing of natural variability such as El Niño Southern Oscillation ENSO To study the impact of weather noise and resolution in the context of a CGCM two IE experiments are performed at different resolutions Atmospheric resolution is an important issue since the noise statistics will depend on the spatial scales resolved A simple formulation to extract atmospheric internal variability is presented The results are compared to their respective control cases where internal atmospheric variability is left unchanged The noise reduction has a major impact on the coupled simulation and the magnitude of this effect strongly depends on the horizontal resolution of the atmospheric component model Specifically applying the noise reduction technique reduces the overall climate variability more effectively at higher resolution This suggests that “weather noise” is more important in sustaining climate variability as resolution increases ENSO statistics dynamics and phase asymmetry are all modified by the noise reduction in particular ENSO becomes more regular with less phase asymmetry when noise is reduced All these effects are more marked for the higher resolution case In contrast ENSO frequency is unchanged by the reduction in the weather noise but its phaselocking to the annual cycle is strongly dependent on noise and resolution At low resolution the noise structure is similar to the signal whereas the spatial structure of the noise deviates from the spatial structure of the signal as resolution increases It is also suggested that eventtoevent differences are largely driven by atmospheric noise as opposed to chaotic dynamics within the context of the largescale coupled system suggesting that there is a welldefined “canonical” eventThis manuscript is part of a PhD dissertation of the first author The first author would like to express thanks to Prof Chidong Zhang RSMAS U of Miami Prof Mohamed Iskandarani RSMAS U of Miami Prof Robert Burgman Florida International University We are grateful to the reviewers for their suggestions The authors acknowledge support from NSF ATM0754341 OCI10749165 and NOAA NA08OAR4320889
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