Dr Antje Weisheimer (she)

Abstract:

Radio occultation experiments have been simulated for the Arctic region on the basis of the regional atmospheric model HIRHAM4. Irregular structures in the atmosphere produce a violation of the quasi-sphericity in the radio signal propagation and exert a strong influence on the accuracy of atmospheric profiles retrieved by the radio occultation technique. Errors in radio occultation data are spatially localised and associated with gradients in atmospheric structures. Local errors reach 2% in retrieved profiles of refractivity corresponding to an error of 6 K in temperature. Therefore mesoscale variations in atmospheric parameter gradients in a specified region must be taken into account when interpreting radio occultation data. We show, that a correction functional can be developed using the refractivity index field calculated from the regional model in order to improve the radio occultation retrieval of atmospheric parameters. This functional is constructed from instantaneous model outputs, as well as from temporally averaged fields of refractivity using data of the HIRHAM4 model for the Arctic atmosphere. The correction functional derived from monthly averaged data reduced the retrieval errors of refractivity, temperature, and pressure in the troposphere, in particular, temperature retrieval errors are reduced up to 1 K. Application of this kind of functional depends on whether the model used for the construction of the functional is able to simulate the real mesoscale atmospheric structures. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract:

Shadowing trajectories can play an important role in assessing the reliability of forecasting models, they can also play an important role in providing state estimates for ensemble forecasts. Gradient descent methods provide one approach for obtaining shadowing trajectories, which have been shown to have many useful properties. There remains the important question whether shadowing trajectories can be found in very high-dimensional systems, like weather and climate models. The principle impediment is the need to compute the derivative (or adjoint) of the system dynamics. In this paper we investigate gradient descent methods that use limited derivative information. We demonstrate the methods with an application to a moderately high-dimensional system using no derivative information at all. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights rserved.

Abstract:

Apart from variations of external forcing components and interactions between climate subsystems, natural atmospheric fluctuations with periods of years, decades and centuries can also be generated by inherent atmospheric dynamical instabilities of the flow. The objective of this study is to investigate the spatial and temporal structure of internal low-frequency atmospheric variability of the Northern Hemisphere using a minimum-complexity model of the extratropical circulation. Here, the main focus is the influence of varying spectral horizontal resolution on the formation of dominant patterns of variability. For this purpose, a three-level quasi-geostrophic atmospheric model with idealized thermal and orographic forcing has been integrated over 1,000 years under perpetual winter conditions with T5, T10, T15, and T21 resolutions. It has been shown that for the crude resolution T5 a rather strong bias occurs, whereas starting with T1O resolution, the nonlinear feedback between large- and small-scale features is reasonably well described. At this resolution a sort of plateau in the model performance has been reached, in respect to both the model climatology and the spatiotemporal structure of variability. Ultralow-frequency variability is most pronounced in the model's stratosphere and is associated with changes in the polar vortex strength and shape caused by vertically propagating planetary waves. Rossby wave trains in the lee of the model large-scale orography are the most dominant structures of long-period fluctuations in the middle troposphere. The results show that interannual- and decadal-scale variations can, in substantial part, be considered as a manifestation of the natural variability of the extratropical atmosphere. The inclusion of a seasonal cycle of the model's diabatic heating increases the interannual and interdecadal variability.