The Surface-Pressure Signature of Atmospheric Tides in Modern Climate Models

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.