Towards multi-resolution global climate modeling with ECHAM6–FESOM. Part I: model formulation and mean climate

By D. Sidorenko, T. Rackow, T. Jung, T. Semmler, D. Barbi, Sergey Danilov, K. Dethloff, W. Dorn, K. Fieg, H. Goessling and 8 more. Climate Dynamics, 2015

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new climate model has been developed that employs a multi-resolution dynamical core for the sea ice-ocean component. In principle, the multi-resolution approach allows one to use enhanced horizontal resolution in dynamically active regions while keeping a coarse-resolution setup otherwise. The coupled model consists of the atmospheric model ECHAM6 and the finite element sea ice-ocean model (FESOM). In this study only moderate refinement of the unstructured ocean grid is applied and the resolution varies from about 25 km in the northern North Atlantic and in the tropics to about 150 km in parts of the open ocean; the results serve as a benchmark upon which future versions that exploit the potential of variable resolution can be built. Details of the formulation of the model are given and its performance in simulating observed aspects of the mean climate is described. Overall, it is found that ECHAM6–FESOM realistically simulates many aspects of the observed climate. More specifically it is found that ECHAM6–FESOM performs at least as well as some of the most sophisticated climate models participating in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. ECHAM6–FESOM shares substantial shortcomings with other climate models when it comes to simulating the North Atlantic circulation.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54f13a87da448f15ff77fe5607720ded2fd733f5

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Citations in the corpus

Finite-Element Sea Ice Model (FESIM), version 2 (2015, methodology): “…version coupled to an atmosphere model, so that its practical performance can be judged by the results of respective papers (see, e.g., Sidorenko et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2012; Wekerle et al., 2013; Timmermann and Hellmer, 2013; Wang et al., 2014; Sidorenko et al., 2015) and is not repeated here.”
Challenges and Prospects in Ocean Circulation Models (2019, methodology): “Recent progress in developing unstructured models such as ADCIRC (Luettich and Westerink, 2000; Dietrich et al., 2012), FESOM (Wang et al., 2014; Sidorenko et al., 2015; Danilov et al., 2017; Wang Q. et al., 2018), FVCOM (Chen et al., 2003), ICON (Korn, 2017), MPAS (Ringler et al., 2013), and SLIM…”
Resolving and Parameterising the Ocean Mesoscale in Earth System Models (2020, methodology): “Two new ocean models with flexible grids have been introduced in CMIP6: FESOM [12] and MPAS [13], and although CMIP6 models generally use quasi-geopotential grids (‘z-coordinates’), one model has terrain-following coordinates (INM-CM5) [14] and two models use Lagrangian hybrid coordinates following ”