Multi-model evaluation of the sensitivity of the global energy budget and hydrological cycle to resolution

作者：Benoît Vannière, Marie‐Estelle Demory, Pier Luigi Vidale, R. Schiemann, Malcolm Roberts, Christopher D. Roberts, Mio Matsueda, Laurent Terray, Torben Koenigk, Retish Senan · 发表于：Climate Dynamics · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1007/s00382-018-4547-y · 被引用次数：91 · 研究领域：Climate variability and models、Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics、Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations

This study undertakes a multi-model comparison with the aim to describe and quantify systematic changes of the global energy and water budgets when the horizontal resolution of atmospheric models is increased and to identify common factors of these changes among models. To do so, we analyse an ensemble of twelve atmosphere-only and six coupled GCMs, with different model formulations and with resolutions spanning those of state-of-the-art coupled GCMs, i.e. from resolutions coarser than 100 km to resolutions finer than 25 km. The main changes in the global energy budget with resolution are a systematic increase in outgoing longwave radiation and decrease in outgoing shortwave radiation due to changes in cloud properties, and a systematic increase in surface latent heat flux; when resolution is increased from 100 to 25 km, the magnitude of the change of those fluxes can be as large as 5 W m −2 . Moreover, all but one atmosphere-only model simulate a decrease of the poleward energy transport at higher resolution, mainly explained by a reduction of the equator-to-pole tropospheric temperature gradient. Regarding hydrological processes, our results are the following: (1) there is an increase of global precipitation with increasing resolution in all models (up to 40 × 10 3 km 3 year −1 ) but the partitioning between land and ocean varies among models; (2) the fraction of total precipitation that falls on land is on average 10% larger at higher resolution in grid point models, but i...