Working Group: Atmosphere, Ice and Ocean
Coordinator
Jennifer BrauchHa Hagemann
Wikis AIO and NEMO-Europe
Overall Objective
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Regional climate models (RCMs) are tools for dynamical downscaling coarse results from global climate circulation models (CGCMs), which are nowadays mainly coupled atmosphere-ocean models (AOGCMs). Ideally, RCMs should be able to determine the regional climate without the influence of the CGCMs, except at the lateral boundaries. However, presently this is not the case for COSMO-CLM, since the lower boundary values over the sea are taken from the AOGCMs. This has a major impact on the quality of the regional model simulations as shown already for the Baltic Sea. To overcome this problem regional coupled atmosphere-ocean models may be used for climate simulations. Several groups in the CLM-Community are working on the coupling of a regional ocean to COSMO-CLM.
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- Improve the representation of the ocean and the interaction with the atmosphere in the COSMO-CLM (Goethe University Frankfurt, BiK-F)
- Better regional representation of North Sea and Baltic Sea in climate simulations (Hereon)
- Simulating polynya processes in the Laptev Sea and the Weddell Sea with a fully coupled A-I-O model (University Trier)
- Assess the added value of high resolution climatic hindcasts and scenarios for the Mediterranean when using coupled atmosphere-ocean models (IMK-TRO (KIT))
- To get a better accuracy, since in the CIRA simulations the lower boundary values over the sea are taken from the global coupled model CMCC-MED. A better regional representation of the Mediterranean Sea is also important in order to increase the accuracy also for climate simulations of the Alpine space (CIRA)
- Carry out simulations over the Southern Ocean to investigate seasonal simulations covering the confluence region of the Brazil and Malvinas currents, where many oceanic eddies occur (C2SM-ETHZ). Thereby two major questions are addressed:
- What is the impact of the highly resolved SST on fluxes between the atmosphere and the ocean and on the lower troposphere? Are highly resolved SSTs required to realistically represent fluxes of heat and freshwater in that region?
- How are these processes affected by the coupling between the atmosphere and the ocean?
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