Tim Palmer

Abstract:

Representing model uncertainty is important for both numerical weather and climate prediction. Stochastic parametrisation schemes are commonly used for this purpose in weather prediction, while perturbed parameter approaches are widely used in the climate community. The performance of these two representations of model uncertainty is considered in the context of the idealised Lorenz ’96 system, in terms of their ability to capture the observed regime behaviour of the system. These results are applicable to the atmosphere, where evidence points to the existence of persistent weather regimes, and where it is desirable that climate models capture this regime behaviour. The stochastic parametrisation schemes considerably improve the representation of regimes when compared to a deterministic model: both the structure and persistence of the regimes are found to improve. The stochastic parametrisation scheme represents the small scale variability present in the full system, which enables the system to explore a larger portion of the system’s attractor, improving the simulated regime behaviour. It is important that temporally correlated noise is used in the stochastic parametrisation—white noise schemes performed similarly to the deterministic model. In contrast, the perturbed parameter ensemble was unable to capture the regime structure of the attractor, with many individual members exploring only one regime. This poor performance was not evident in other climate diagnostics. Finally, a ‘climate change’ experiment was performed, where a change in external forcing resulted in changes to the regime structure of the attractor. The temporally correlated stochastic schemes captured these changes well.

Abstract:

The simulation of quasi-persistent regime structures in an atmospheric model with horizontal resolution typical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fifth assessment report simulations, is shown to be unrealistic. A higher resolution configuration of the same model, with horizontal resolution typical of that used in operational numerical weather prediction, is able to simulate these regime structures realistically. The spatial patterns of the simulated regimes are remarkably accurate at high resolution. A model configuration at intermediate resolution shows a marked improvement over the low-resolution configuration, particularly in terms of the temporal characteristics of the regimes, but does not produce a simulation as accurate as the very-high-resolution configuration. It is demonstrated that the simulation of regimes can be significantly improved, even at low resolution, by the introduction of a stochastic physics scheme. At low resolution the stochastic physics scheme drastically improves both the spatial and temporal aspects of the regimes simulation. These results highlight the importance of small-scale processes on large-scale climate variability, and indicate that although simulating variability at small scales is a necessity, it may not be necessary to represent the small-scales accurately, or even explicitly, in order to improve the simulation of large-scale climate. It is argued that these results could have important implications for improving both global climate simulations, and the ability of high-resolution limited-area models, forced by low-resolution global models, to reliably simulate regional climate change signals.