The Surface-Pressure Signature of Atmospheric Tides in Modern Climate Models
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Lindzen-2011-Mar-The Surface-Pressure Signature of Atmospheric.pdf
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5.56 MB
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Author(s)
Covey, Curt
Dai, Aiguo
Marsh, Daniel R.
Lindzen, Richard Siegmund
Date Issued
March 2011
Journal
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Covey, Curt et al. “The Surface-Pressure Signature of Atmospheric Tides in Modern Climate Models.” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 68 (2011): 495-514. © 2011 American Meteorological Society .
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Although atmospheric tides driven by solar heating are readily detectable at the earth’s surface as variations in air pressure, their simulations in current coupled global climate models have not been fully examined. This work examines near-surface-pressure tides in climate models that contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); it compares them with tides both from observations and from the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM), which extends from the earth’s surface to the thermosphere. Surprising consistency is found among observations and all model simulations, despite variation of the altitudes of model upper boundaries from 32 to 76 km in the IPCC models and at 135 km for WACCM. These results are consistent with previous suggestions that placing a model’s upper boundary at low altitude leads to partly compensating errors—such as reducing the forcing of the tides by ozone heating, but also introducing spurious waves at the upper boundary, which propagate to the surface.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/2010jas3560.1
