Summertime circumglobal Rossby waves in climate models: Small biases in upper-level circulation create substantial biases in surface imprint

In boreal summer, circumglobal Rossby waves can promote stagnating weather systems that favor extreme events like heatwaves or droughts. Recent work highlighted the risks associated with amplified Rossby wavenumber 5 and 7 in triggering simultaneous warm anomalies in specific agricultural breadbaskets in the Northern Hemisphere. These type of wave patterns thus pose potential risks for food production, as well as human health, and other impacts. The representation of such summertime wave events and their surface imprints in general circulation models (GCMs) has not been systematically analyzed. Here we validate three state-of-the-art global climate models (EC-Earth, CESM, and MIROC), quantify their biases and provide insights into the underlying physical reasons for the biases. To do so, the ExtremeX experiments output data were used, which are (1) historic simulations (1979–2015/2016) of a freely running atmosphere with prescribed ocean, and experiments that additionally nudge toward the observed (2) upper-level horizontal winds in the atmosphere, (3) soil moisture conditions, or (4) both. The nudged experiments are used to trace the sources of the model biases to either the large-scale atmospheric circulation or surface feedback processes. We show that while the wave position and magnitude is represented well compared to ERA5 reanalysis data. During high amplitudes (> 1.5 s.d.) wave-5 and wave- 7 events, the imprint on surface variables temperature, precipitation and sea level pressure is substantially underestimated: typically, by a factor of 1.5 in correlation and normalized standard deviations (n.s.d.) for near-surface temperature and mean sea level pressure. As for the precipitation, it’s still a factor of 1.5 for n.s.d. but 2 for correlation. The correlations and n.s.d. for surface variables do not improve if only the soil moisture is prescribed, but considerably increased when the upper-level atmosphere circulation is nudged. The underestimation factors are corrected almost entirely. When applying both soil moisture prescription and the nudging of upper-level atmosphere, both the correlation and n.s.d. values are quite similar to only atmosphere component is nudged experiments. Hence, the near-surface biases can be substantially improved when nudging the upper-level circulation providing evidence that relatively small biases in the models’ representation of the upper-level waves can strongly affect associated temperature and rainfall anomalies.