Description: The ability of German regional climate Model (REMO) to simulate the near surface air temperature and total precipitation over China in 1989-2008 were assessed with the use of Taylor diagrams and bias analysis. Comparing the simulated near surface air temperature with a 20-year observational dataset from China, the spatial correlation coefficient was relatively high (0.94). However, the spatial correlation coefficient for total precipitation was relatively low (about 0.42). The near surface air temperature simulated by REMO was higher than the observed values in most part of China, showing a bias range within 4 C. Significant cold bias of about -4 to -2 C occurred over most of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. In terms of total precipitation, the simulated values were higher than the observed ones, with biases evenly distributed. The annual mean bias in most part of China was within 300 mm. Except for the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, South China and Southwest China, REMO accurately reflected the distribution of near surface air temperature and total precipitation. REMO represented the temperature and total precipitation well in North China and Northeast China. REMO simulations were quite close to observations for near surface air temperature in summer and total precipitation in winter. REMO still needs to be improved in complex terrain areas.

Description: Ocean model biases such as the North West corner cold bias connected to the location of the Gulf Stream path, the warm bias in upwelling zones, the warm bias in the Southern Ocean, and model drift like the deep ocean warm bias which tends to peak in around 800 to 1000 m depth in the Atlantic Ocean are issues common among state-of-the-art ocean models. These issues are often amplified when the ocean model is coupled to an atmosphere model to perform climate simulations. Furthermore, unrealistic freezing of the Labrador Sea is an issue in various climate models. With the unstructured mesh approach in our Finite Element Sea ice Ocean Model (FESOM) we are able to systematically investigate the benefits of local refinement of the ocean model grid both in an uncoupled set-up (sea-ice ocean only) as well as in a fully coupled climate model (atmosphere- land-sea ice-ocean). While the horizontal ocean model resolution is 25 km on average in the finer grids, we refine the grids in some key areas to up to 5 km. Therefore we can explicitly resolve ocean eddies and simulate eddy-mean flow interactions in these key areas. The atmosphere-land component of our AWI-CM (Alfred Wegener Institute Climate Model) is ECHAM6-JSBACH developed at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. Here we present results of century-long uncoupled and coupled simulations on ocean model grids with different local refinements while keeping the atmosphere resolution constant in the coupled simulations. Results indicate that high horizontal resolutions in key regions such as the Gulf Stream / North Atlantic Current area or the Agulhas Stream can reduce biases such as the North West corner cold bias and the deep ocean model drift.

Description: The recently established AWI Climate Model (AWI-CM), a coupled configuration of the Finite Element Sea Ice-Ocean Model (FESOM) with the atmospheric model ECHAM6, uses a novel multi-resolution approach: Its ocean component builds on a finite element dynamical core supporting unstructured triangular surface grids, allowing to distribute the grid points in a flexible manner. This allows to concentrate resolution in dynamically important regions, with a continuous transition zone to the coarser resolution in other areas. The model is an ideal tool to study the influence of explicit resolution of smaller scales in dedicated experiments. The unique – spatially seamless – approach might also be of benefit when it comes to temporally seamless prediction, bridging the gap between numerical weather prediction and climate models. A first benchmark set-up of AWI-CM with moderate resolution in the atmosphere (T63) and 25km in key ocean areas, e.g. around the equator, achieved a similar overall simulation performance in a long control simulation compared to well-established CMIP5 models. In particular, the (isotropically) increased equatorial resolution considerably increased the realism of TIW activity and ENSO-related variability compared to standard resolutions. The potential of AWI-CM is further exploited within the EU project PRIMAVERA in the HighResMIP of CMIP6, where we plan to contribute simulations with eddy-resolving resolutions (1/12° or 9-10 km) in key areas of the global ocean, such as the Gulf Stream-North Atlantic Current region, the Agulhas retroflection zone, or the Arctic basin. First simulations show distinct improvements with respect to the development of deep temperature and salinity biases in the North Atlantic Ocean and an overall improvement of surface biases. At even higher resolutions of 4.5 km locally in the Arctic, linear kinematic features emerge in the simulated sea ice distribution with potentially strong impacts on air-sea fluxes in the coupled system. Although the tested set-ups are computationally very demanding (with numbers of grid points comparable to a regular 0.25° grid), the throughput is high at about 8 simulated years per day because of high scalability. In addition, we are about to finish the development of a finite volume version of the ocean model code (FESOM 2). It is already faster than the original FESOM version by a factor of two to three, which will further enlarge the set of computationally feasible applications.

Description: The recently established AWI Climate Model (AWI-CM), a coupled configuration of the Finite Element Sea Ice-Ocean Model (FESOM) with the atmospheric model ECHAM6, uses a novel multi-resolution approach: Its ocean component builds on a finite element dynamical core supporting unstructured triangular surface grids, allowing to distribute the grid points in a flexible manner. This allows to concentrate resolution in dynamically important regions, with a continuous transition zone to the coarser resolution in other areas. The model is an ideal tool to study the influence of explicit resolution of smaller scales in dedicated experiments. The unique – spatially seamless – approach might also be of benefit when it comes to temporally seamless prediction, bridging the gap between numerical weather prediction and climate models. A first benchmark set-up of AWI-CM with moderate resolution in the atmosphere (T63) and 25km in key ocean areas, e.g. around the equator, achieved a similar overall simulation performance in a long control simulation compared to well-established CMIP5 models. In particular, the (isotropically) increased equatorial resolution considerably increased the realism of TIW activity and ENSO-related variability compared to standard resolutions. The potential of AWI-CM is further exploited within the EU project PRIMAVERA in the HighResMIP of CMIP6, where we plan to contribute simulations with eddy-resolving resolutions (1/12° or 9-10 km) in key areas of the global ocean, such as the Gulf Stream-North Atlantic Current region, the Agulhas retroflection zone, or the Arctic basin. First simulations show distinct improvements with respect to the development of deep temperature and salinity biases in the North Atlantic Ocean and an overall improvement of surface biases. At even higher resolutions of 4.5 km locally in the Arctic, linear kinematic features emerge in the simulated sea ice distribution with potentially strong impacts on air-sea fluxes in the coupled system. Although the tested set-ups are computationally very demanding (with numbers of grid points comparable to a regular 0.25° grid), the throughput is high at about 8 simulated years per day because of high scalability. In addition, we are about to finish the development of a finite volume version of the ocean model code (FESOM 2). It is already faster than the original FESOM version by a factor of two to three, which will further enlarge the set of computationally feasible applications.

Description: Mesoscale eddies contribute to the dynamics of ocean circulation in many important ways. Resolving them in the context of global ocean simulations still present a challenge because the Rossby radius of deformation is highly variable and can be as small as several km at high latitudes. Models formulated on unstructured meshes provide a possibility of locally eddy resolving approach. However, a question arises on how to select the resolution, and how mesh variability may affect the eddy dynamics. We discuss a set of questions related to this topic showing that (i) the observed variability and the information on the behavior of the Rossby radius can be one of the criteria helping in mesh design and that (ii) there might be a delayed turbulence development downstream into a high-resolution domain. The latter means that the size of refined patches has to be sufficiently large to simulate the unbiased eddy dynamics. As resolution is increasing, the resolved eddy dynamics may contain a substantial ageostrophic component which may lead to a noisy signal in the vertical velocity on the mesh patches where the resolution is varied. The appearance of this noise depends on the details of discretization. Variable resolution also leads to a question how to combine the locally resolved eddy dynamics with the parameterized one over the coarse part. In a more broad context, even locally eddy-resolving global meshes are already large and approach in size the eddy-permitting and eddy-resolving meshes of global regular models (from 1/4 degree or finer, or 1M or more surface vertices), which implies massively parallel implementations. Our experience with FESOM1.4 shows that because of good parallel scalability the throughput (simulated model years/per day) reached on large meshes is very competitive to (not worse than) that shown by regular-mesh models, with only a moderately increased demand on computational resources. This in a way changes the message to the community on the numerical efficiency of unstructured-mesh models for global ocean applications: these models, especially the new finite-volume developments (MPAS, FESOM2, ICON), can be nearly as fast as the regular-mesh models in terms of their throughput.

Description: We make a review on the modelling efforts devoted to better understand the complex oceanography of the Strait of Gibraltar, where Atlantic waters enter the Mediterranean Sea as a surface flow, and Mediterranean outflowing waters spread into the interior of the North Atlantic forming a prominent basin-scale termohaline anomaly at mid-depths. Besides the mean exchange flows relevant phenomena include tides, high amplitude internal waves, meteorologically forced subinertial oscillations, mixing, and involve a wide-range of spatio-temporal scales. The remarkable progress achieved in understanding and modelling the ocean processes in the Strait of Gibraltar allows now undertaking new societal demands and scientific challenges. One societal demand is given by the increasing need of operational oceanographic information as a support tool for decision-makers in an area considered as one of world's busiest shipping lanes, with an increased risk of maritime accidents and environmental pollution. We present an Operational Oceanography system for the Strait of Gibraltar responding to that demand. On the other hand, new scientific challenges call for the need of developing perspective-modelling studies accounting for process and scale interactions. Using a global ocean general circulation model with regional high resolution around the Iberian Peninsula we are able to resolve the local-scale at the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cádiz while focusing on the basin scale. As a result, we find that tidally-induced local-scale processes in the Strait and in the Gulf of Cádiz appear to have a drastic impact on the distribution of Mediterranean outflow waters in the Atlantic basin.

Description: If meshes with variable resolution, in particular, unstructured meshes are refined to improve the representation of local dynamics by resolving eddies, a question arises as how to vary their resolution and where precisely to deploy the refinement. We propose to use the observed sea surface height variability as a criterion. We explore the utility of such an approach (i) in a suite of simple experiments simulating a wind-driven double gyre flow in a stratified circular basin and (ii) in simulations of global ocean circulation performed with the Finite Element Sea Ice Ocean Model (FESOM). For the double gyre case we show that the variability simulated in the high-resolution reference run can be well captured on coarser meshes of variable resolution if they are refined in the domain where the variability is substantial in the reference run and additionally include dynamically-important areas around the jet separation. In simulations related to the real global ocean the refinement based on the observed variability proves to be helpful too, yet the difference between the simulated and observed variability may remain higher. In this case it is more difficult to guess how well the areas upstream of sites with high variability have to be resolved whereas the practical limitation on the total number of mesh nodes also limits the size of refined areas if there are too many of them. The presence of coarse mesh in close proximity to the refined areas effectively damps the simulated variability in this case. A practical recommendation is to limit refinement to several regions, but make them sufficiently wide yet still following the observed variability pattern.

Description: Wind energy is susceptible to global climate change because it could alter the wind patterns. Then, improvement of our knowledge of wind field variability is crucial to optimize the use of wind resources in a given region. Here, we quantify the effects of climate change on the surface wind speed field over the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands using an ensemble of four regional climate models driven by a global climate model. Regions of the Iberian Peninsula with coherent temporal variability in wind speed in each of the models are identified and analysed using cluster analysis. These regions are continuous in each model and exhibit a high degree of overlap across the models. The models forced by the European Reanalysis Interim (ERA-Interim) reanalysis are validated against the European Climate Assessment and Dataset wind. We find that regional models are able to simulate with reasonable skill the spatial distribution of wind speed at 10 m in the Iberian Peninsula, identifying areas with common wind variability. Under the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A1B climate change scenario, the wind speed in the identified regions for 2031–2050 is up to 5% less than during the 1980–1999 control period for all models. The models also agree on the time evolution of spatially averaged wind speed in each region, showing a negative trend for all of them. These tendencies depend on the region and are significant at p = 5% or slightly more for annual trends, while seasonal trends are not significant in most of the regions and seasons. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Description: The key role of the South Atlantic Anticyclone (SAA) on the seasonal cycle of the tropical Atlantic is investigated with a regionally coupled atmosphere–ocean model for two different coupled domains. Both domains include the equatorial Atlantic and a large portion of the northern tropical Atlantic, but one extends southward, and the other northwestward. The SAA is simulated as internal model variability in the former, and is prescribed as external forcing in the latter. In the first case, the model shows significant warm biases in sea surface temperature (SST) in the Angola-Benguela front zone. If the SAA is externally prescribed, these biases are substantially reduced. The biases are both of oceanic and atmospheric origin, and are influenced by ocean–atmosphere interactions in coupled runs. The strong SST austral summer biases are associated with a weaker SAA, which weakens the winds over the southeastern tropical Atlantic, deepens the thermocline and prevents the local coastal upwelling of colder water. The biases in the basins interior in this season could be related to the advection and eddy transport of the coastal warm anomalies. In winter, the deeper thermocline and atmospheric fluxes are probably the main biases sources. Biases in incoming solar radiation and thus cloudiness seem to be a secondary effect only observed in austral winter. We conclude that the external prescription of the SAA south of 20°S improves the simulation of the seasonal cycle over the tropical Atlantic, revealing the fundamental role of this anticyclone in shaping the climate over this region.

Description: Medicanes are cyclones over the Mediterranean Sea having a tropical-like structure but a rather small size, that can produce significant damage due to the combination of intense winds and heavy precipitation. Future climate projections, performed generally with individual atmospheric climate models, indicate that the intensity of the medicanes could increase under climate change conditions. The availability of large ensembles of high resolution and ocean–atmosphere coupled regional climate model (RCM) simulations, performed in MedCORDEX and EURO-CORDEX projects, represents an opportunity to improve the assessment of the impact of climate change on medicanes. As a first step towards such an improved assessment, we analyze the ability of the RCMs used in these projects to reproduce the observed characteristics of medicanes, and the impact of increased resolution and air-sea coupling on their simulation. In these storms, air-sea interaction plays a fundamental role in their formation and intensification, a different mechanism from that of extra-tropical cyclones, where the baroclinic instability mechanism prevails. An observational database, based on satellite images combined with high resolution simulations (Miglietta et al. in Geophys Res Lett 40:2400–2405, 2013), is used as a reference for evaluating the simulations. In general, the simulated medicanes do not coincide on a case-by-case basis with the observed medicanes. However, observed medicanes with a high intensity and relatively long duration of tropical characteristics are better replicated in simulations. The observed spatial distribution of medicanes is generally well simulated, while the monthly distribution reveals the difficulty of simulating the medicanes that first appear in September after the summer minimum in occurrence. Increasing the horizontal resolution has a systematic and generally positive impact on the frequency of simulated medicanes, while the general underestimation of their intensity is not corrected in most cases. The capacity of a few models to better simulate the medicane intensity suggests that the model formulation is more important than reducing the grid spacing alone. A negative intensity feedback is frequently the result of air-sea interaction for tropical cyclones in other basins. The introduction of air-sea coupling in the present simulations has an overall limited impact on medicane frequency and intensity, but it produces an interesting seasonal shift of the simulated medicanes from autumn to winter. This fact, together with the analysis of two contrasting particular cases, indicates that the negative feedback could be limited or even absent in certain situations. We suggest that the effects of air-sea interaction on medicanes may depend on the oceanic mixed layer depth, thus increasing the applicability of ocean–atmosphere coupled RCMs for climate change analysis of this kind of cyclones.