Structure and Performance of GFDL's CM4.0 Climate Model

By I. Held, H. Guo, Alistair Adcroft, J. Dunne, L. Horowitz, J. Krasting, E. Shevliakova, M. Winton, Ming Zhao, Mitchell Bushuk and 35 more. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 2019

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We describe the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory's CM4.0 physical climate model, with emphasis on those aspects that may be of particular importance to users of this model and its simulations. The model is built with the AM4.0/LM4.0 atmosphere/land model and OM4.0 ocean model. Topics include the rationale for key choices made in the model formulation, the stability as well as drift of the preindustrial control simulation, and comparison of key aspects of the historical simulations with observations from recent decades. Notable achievements include the relatively small biases in seasonal spatial patterns of top‐of‐atmosphere fluxes, surface temperature, and precipitation; reduced double Intertropical Convergence Zone bias; dramatically improved representation of ocean boundary currents; a high‐quality simulation of climatological Arctic sea ice extent and its recent decline; and excellent simulation of the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation spectrum and structure. Areas of concern include inadequate deep convection in the Nordic Seas; an inaccurate Antarctic sea ice simulation; precipitation and wind composites still affected by the equatorial cold tongue bias; muted variability in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation; strong 100 year quasiperiodicity in Southern Ocean ventilation; and a lack of historical warming before 1990 and too rapid warming thereafter due to high climate sensitivity and strong aerosol forcing, in contrast to the observational record. Overall, CM4.0 scores very well in its fidelity against observations compared to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 generation in terms of both mean state and modes of variability and should prove a valuable new addition for analysis across a broad array of applications.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31f42d2bfca96e36d00f851c48f4da226b9715ee

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Resolving and Parameterising the Ocean Mesoscale in Earth System Models (2020, background): “The large-scale pattern of SST in ESMs demonstrates errors that are broadly similar across a range of models with cooling in the North Pacific, warming in the Southern Ocean, warming in the Eastern Boundary Upwelling zones, and a patch of very cold water (‘blue spot’) in the North Atlantic [26, 28, ”