Authors: Kamel Chikhar Pierre Gauthier
Publish Date: 2015/01/25
Volume: 45, Issue: 9-10, Pages: 2515-2526
Abstract
Climate simulations results can be very different when the regional climate model used is driven by different data In this paper the fifth generation Canadian Regional Climate Model CRCM5 response is assessed when driven by various boundary conditions The latter are provided by outputs from the secondgeneration Canadian Earth System Model CanESM2 and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology’s Earth System Model MPIESMLR and also from ERAInterim reanalysis Physical and dynamical tendencies are analysed when the regional model is well spun up and is sufficiently affected by the lateral forcing data The results indicate that the model is very sensitive to those imposed lateral conditions Compared to observations the CRCM5 exhibits excessive heating in the lower levels and cooling above when driven by the three driving data It is also found that the two global models contribute to these anomalies but with different effects Temperature tendencies revealed a cooling in lower layers when CRCM5 is driven by CanESM2 while a heating is noted when the model is forced by MPIESMLR Specific humidity tendencies also showed different effects depending on the driving data usedThe authors would like to thank Mrs Katja Winger and Dr Bernard Dugas for their support through numerous discussions and advice Comments from Dr Oumarou Nikiema and Prof René Laprise on early results helped us to better understand the implications of our results This research was funded by the Canadian Network for Regional Climate and Weather Processes CNRCWP funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NSERC Climate Change and Atmosphere Research CCAR program the Québec’s Ministère du Développement Économique de l’Innovation et de l’Exportation MDEIE the Grants and Contribution program of Environment Canada and NSERC’s Discovery Grant program High performance computing resources were provided by Compute Canada on the Guillimin platform of the Calcul Québec regional consortium The first author benefited from a scholarship form the Faculty of Science of the Université du Québec à Montréal
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