Search

One of the major globally relevant systematic biases in previous generations of climate models has been an equatorward bias in the latitude of the Southern Hemisphere (SH) mid-latitude tropospheric eddy driven westerly jet. The far-reaching implications of this for Southern Ocean heat and carbon uptake and Antarctic land and sea ice are key reasons why addressing this bias is a high priority. It is therefore of primary importance to evaluate the representation of the SH westerly jet in the latest generation of global climate and earth system models that comprise the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). In this paper we assess the representation of major indices of SH extratropical atmospheric circulation in CMIP6 by comparison against both observations and the previous generation of CMIP5 models. Indices assessed are the latitude and speed of the westerly jet, variability of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), and representation of the Amundsen Sea Low (ASL). These are calculated from the historical forcing simulations of both CMIP5 and CMIP6 for time periods matching available observational and reanalysis data sets. From the 39 CMIP6 models available at the time of writing there is an overall reduction in the equatorward bias of the annual mean westerly jet from 1.9° in CMIP5 to 0.4° in CMIP6 and from a seasonal perspective the reduction is clearest in austral spring and summer. This is accompanied by a halving of the bias of SAM decorrelation timescales compared to CMIP5. However, no such overall improvements are evident for the ASL. Fil: Bracegirdle, T.J.. British Antarctic Survey; Reino Unido Fil: Holmes, C.R.. British Artarctic Survey; Reino Unido Fil: Hosking, J.S.. British Antarctic Survey; Reino Unido Fil: Marshall, G.J.. British Antarctic Survey; Reino Unido Fil: Osman, Marisol. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera; Argentina Fil: Patterson, M.. University of Oxford; Reino Unido Fil: Rackow, T.. Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; Alemania

We present a simulation of Antarctic iceberg drift and melting that includes small, medium-sized, and giant tabular icebergs with a realistic size distribution. For the first time, an iceberg model is initialized with a set of nearly 7000 observed iceberg positions and sizes around Antarctica. The study highlights the necessity to account for larger and giant icebergs in order to obtain accurate melt climatologies. We simulate drift and lateral melt using iceberg-draft averaged ocean currents, temperature, and salinity. A new basal melting scheme, originally applied in ice shelf melting studies, uses in situ temperature, salinity, and relative velocities at an iceberg's bottom. Climatology estimates of Antarctic iceberg melting based on simulations of small (≤ 2.2 km), 'small-to-medium'-sized (≤ 10 km), and small-to-giant icebergs (including icebergs > 10 km) exhibit differential characteristics: successive inclusion of larger icebergs leads to a reduced seasonality of the iceberg meltwater flux and a shift of the mass input to the area north of 58 °S, while less meltwater is released into the coastal areas. This suggests that estimates of meltwater input solely based on the simulation of small icebergs introduce a systematic meridional bias; they underestimate the northward mass transport and are, thus, closer to the rather crude treatment of iceberg melting as coastal runoff in models without an interactive iceberg model. Future ocean simulations will benefit from the improved meridional distribution of iceberg melt, especially in climate change scenarios where the impact of iceberg melt is likely to increase due to increased calving from the Antarctic ice sheet.

A new global climate model setup using FESOM2.0 for the sea ice-ocean component and ECHAM6.3 for the atmosphere and land surface has been developed. Replacing FESOM1.4 by FESOM2.0 promises a higher efficiency of the new climate setup compared to its predecessor. The new setup allows for long-term climate integrations using a locally eddy-resolving ocean. Here it is evaluated in terms of (1) the mean state and long-term drift under preindustrial climate conditions, (2) the fidelity in simulating the historical warming, and (3) differences between coarse and eddy-resolving ocean configurations. The results show that the realism of the new climate setup is overall within the range of existing models. In terms of oceanic temperatures, the historical warming signal is of smaller amplitude than the model drift in case of a relatively short spin-up. However, it is argued that the strategy of “de-drifting” climate runs after the short spin-up, proposed by the HighResMIP protocol, allows one to isolate the warming signal. Moreover, the eddy-permitting/resolving ocean setup shows notable improvements regarding the simulation of oceanic surface temperatures, in particular in the Southern Ocean.