Improved Climate Simulation by MIROC5: Mean States, Variability, and Climate Sensitivity

By Masahiro Watanabe, Tatsuo Suzuki, Ryouta O’ishi, Y. Komuro, S. Watanabe, S. Emori, Toshihiko Takemura, M. Chikira, T. Ogura, M. Sekiguchi and 7 more. Journal of Climate, 2010

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A new version of the atmosphere–ocean general circulation model cooperatively produced by the Japanese research community, known as the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC), has recently been developed. A century-long control experiment was performed using the new version (MIROC5) with the standard resolution of the T85 atmosphere and 1° ocean models. The climatological mean state and variability are then compared with observations and those in a previous version (MIROC3.2) with two different resolutions (medres, hires), coarser and finer than the resolution of MIROC5. A few aspects of the mean fields in MIROC5 are similar to or slightly worse than MIROC3.2, but otherwise the climatological features are considerably better. In particular, improvements are found in precipitation, zonal mean atmospheric fields, equatorial ocean subsurface fields, and the simulation of El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The difference between MIROC5 and the previous model is larger than that between the two MIROC3.2 versions, indicating a greater effect of updating parameterization schemes on the model climate than increasing the model resolution. The mean cloud property obtained from the sophisticated prognostic schemes in MIROC5 shows good agreement with satellite measurements. MIROC5 reveals an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 2.6 K, which is lower than that in MIROC3.2 by 1 K. This is probably due to the negative feedback of low clouds to the increasing concentration of CO2, which is opposite to that in MIROC3.2.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3caf5db0198d6347e0b5ca2f5b9558d1ee51f7c7

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Citations in the corpus

The Non-hydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model: description and development (2014, result): “Furthermore, the chemical module has been currently expanded to a fully coupled aerosol-chemistry module by coupling CHASER with SPRINTARS, as developed in Watanabe et al. (2011) and used by MIROC.”
Accuracy of Global Upper Ocean Heat Content Estimation Expected from Present Observational Data Sets (2017, background): “An accurate OHC estimation is needed for understanding the global energy balance (Murphy et al. 2009), sea level budget (Lombard et al. 2005; Cazenave and Llovel 2010), and earth system modeling (Watanabe et al. 2010; Yukimoto et al. 2012) for future climate predictions.”
A Unified Convection Scheme (UNICON). Part I: Formulation (2014, methodology): “The conversion term Ĉf is set to zero except for Ĉu and Ĉy, which are parameterized following Wu and Yanai (1994) and Gregory et al.”
Are climate model simulations of clouds improving? An evaluation using the ISCCP simulator (2012, background): “Marine-Earth Science and Technology Watanabe et al. [2010] 30 M5”
Tuning the climate of a global model (2012, methodology): “A somewhat different approach was taken by Watanabe et al. [2010] who tuned a number of parameters related to the cloud, convection, turbulence, aerosol, and sea ice schemes iteratively every 5 years, while running their model (MIROC5) in coupled mode for about thousand years.”