2004 LOM Workshop

Wednesday 9:20 - 9:40 a.m.

Investigation of Tropical Atlantic and Pacific variability with SPEEDO: A flexible coupled model for climate studies.

Reindert Haarsma, Wilco Hazeleger, Camiel Severijns, Frank Selten, Andreas Sterl
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), P.O. Box 201, 3730 AE De Bilt, The Netherlands
haarsma@knmi.nl

ABSTRACT

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A flexible coupled atmosphere/ocean/land model SPEEDO has been developed for climate variability studies. The atmosphere model (SPEEDY, Molteni 2003) is a primitive equation model of intermediate complexity. The horizontal resolution is T30 and it has 7 layers. A simplified physical package makes the model very efficient. It is coupled to a land bucket model. The ocean model is the Miami Isopycnal Coordinate Model (MICOM). For MICOM a user friendly shell has been developed which facilitates the choice and setup of different model configurations. After carefull tuning of cloud and mixing parameters in the ocean the biasses in the Tropical Atlantic and Pacific are strongly reduced. The zonal SST gradients are well represented and the seasonal cycle compares well to observations. First results of the variability in the Tropical Atlantic and Pacific simulated by SPEEDO will be presented. References: Molteni, F., 2003: Atmospheric simulations using a GCM with simplified physical parameterizations. I: model climatology and variability in multi-decadal experiments. Clim. Dyn., 20, 175-191.

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LOM Users' Workshop, February 9-11, 2004