New Gravity Wave Treatments for GISS Climate Models
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Sun-2011-Aug-New Gravity Wave.pdf
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2.33 MB
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Author(s)
Geller, Marvin A.
Zhou, Tiehan
Ruedy, Reto
Aleinov, Igor
Nazarenko, Larissa
Tausnev, Nikolai L.
Sun, Shan
Kelley, Maxwell
Cheng, Ye
Date Issued
August 2011
Journal
Journal of Climate
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Geller, Marvin A. et al. “New Gravity Wave Treatments for GISS Climate Models.” Journal of Climate 24.15 (2011): 3989–4002.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Previous versions of GISS climate models have either used formulations of Rayleigh drag to represent unresolved gravity wave interactions with the model-resolved flow or have included a rather complicated treatment of unresolved gravity waves that, while being climate interactive, involved the specification of a relatively large number of parameters that were not well constrained by observations and also was computationally very expensive. Here, the authors introduce a relatively simple and computationally efficient specification of unresolved orographic and nonorographic gravity waves and their interaction with the resolved flow. Comparisons of the GISS model winds and temperatures with no gravity wave parameterization; with only orographic gravity wave parameterization; and with both orographic and nonorographic gravity wave parameterizations are shown to illustrate how the zonal mean winds and temperatures converge toward observations. The authors also show that the specifications of orographic and nonorographic gravity waves must be different in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Then results are presented where the nonorographic gravity wave sources are specified to represent sources from convection in the intertropical convergence zone and spontaneous emission from jet imbalances. Finally, a strategy to include these effects in a climate-dependent manner is suggested.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
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.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/2011jcli4013.1
