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A systematic approach to identify the sources of tropical SST errors in coupled models using the adjustment of initialised experiments

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Abstract

Understanding the sources of systematic errors in climate models is challenging because of coupled feedbacks and errors compensation. The developing seamless approach proposes that the identification and the correction of short term climate model errors have the potential to improve the modeled climate on longer time scales. In previous studies, initialised atmospheric simulations of a few days have been used to compare fast physics processes (convection, cloud processes) among models. The present study explores how initialised seasonal to decadal hindcasts (re-forecasts) relate transient week-to-month errors of the ocean and atmospheric components to the coupled model long-term pervasive SST errors. A protocol is designed to attribute the SST biases to the source processes. It includes five steps: (1) identify and describe biases in a coupled stabilized simulation, (2) determine the time scale of the advent of the bias and its propagation, (3) find the geographical origin of the bias, (4) evaluate the degree of coupling in the development of the bias, (5) find the field responsible for the bias. This strategy has been implemented with a set of experiments based on the initial adjustment of initialised simulations and exploring various degrees of coupling. In particular, hindcasts give the time scale of biases advent, regionally restored experiments show the geographical origin and ocean-only simulations isolate the field responsible for the bias and evaluate the degree of coupling in the bias development. This strategy is applied to four prominent SST biases of the IPSLCM5A-LR coupled model in the tropical Pacific, that are largely shared by other coupled models, including the Southeast Pacific warm bias and the equatorial cold tongue bias. Using the proposed protocol, we demonstrate that the East Pacific warm bias appears in a few months and is caused by a lack of upwelling due to too weak meridional coastal winds off Peru. The cold equatorial bias, which surprisingly takes 30 years to develop, is the result of an equatorward advection of midlatitude cold SST errors. Despite large development efforts, the current generation of coupled models shows only little improvement. The strategy proposed in this study is a further step to move from the current random ad hoc approach, to a bias-targeted, priority setting, systematic model development approach.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sonia Labetoulle and Marie-Alice Foujols, who generously provided help to set up the numerical experiments and Christophe Cassou, Sandrine Bony, Pascal Terray and Kenshi Izumo, for fruitful discussions. We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments, which helped improve the manuscript.

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  1. Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat, Expérimentations et approches numériques, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7159 CNRS / IRD/Universit Pierre et Marie Curie/MNHN, Boîte 100-4, Place Jussieu, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Benoît Vannière, Eric Guilyardi & Gurvan Madec

  2. NCAS-Climate, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Eric Guilyardi, Thomas Toniazzo & Steve Woolnough

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  1. Benoît Vannière
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  2. Eric Guilyardi
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  4. Gurvan Madec
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  5. Steve Woolnough
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Correspondence to Benoît Vannière.

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Vannière, B., Guilyardi, E., Toniazzo, T. et al. A systematic approach to identify the sources of tropical SST errors in coupled models using the adjustment of initialised experiments. Clim Dyn 43, 2261–2282 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2051-6

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