Comparisons of Surface Meteorology and Turbulent Heat Fluxes over the Atlantic: NWP Model Analyses versus Moored Buoy Observations*

Abstract

Surface meteorological variables and turbulent heat fluxes in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction‐National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalyses 1 and 2 (NCEP1 and NCEP2) and the analysis from the operational system of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are compared with high-quality moored buoy observations in regions of the Atlantic including the eastern North Atlantic, the coastal regions of the western North Atlantic, and the Tropics. The buoy latent and sensible heat fluxes are determined from buoy measurements using the recently improved Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean‐Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE) flux algorithm. The time mean oceanic heat loss from the model analyses is systematically overestimated in all the regions. The overestimation in latent heat loss ranges from about 14 W m22 (13%) in the eastern subtropical North Atlantic to about 29 W m22 (30%) in the Tropics to about 30 W m22 (49%) in the midlatitude coastal areas, where the overestimation in sensible heat flux reaches about 20 W m 22 (60%). Depending upon the region and the NWP model, these systematic overestimations are either reduced, or change to underestimations, or remain unchanged when the TOGA COARE flux algorithm is used to recalculate the fluxes. The bias in surface meteorological variables, one of the major factors related to the biases in the revised NWP heat fluxes, varies with region and NWP analysis. Generally the temperature and humidity biases in the coastal regions are much larger than other regions. In the extratropical regions, NCEP1 and NCEP2 generally show a wet bias, which is mainly responsible for the underestimation in the revised NWP latent heat loss. In the Tropics a dry bias is found in the NWP analyses, particularly in ECMWF and NCEP2, which contributes to the overestimation in the revised NWP latent heat loss. Compared to NCEP1, NCEP2 shows less cold bias in 2-m air temperature and thus less biased sensible heat flux; NCEP2 also shows less humid bias in 2-m humidity in the extratropical regions but more dry bias in 2-m humidity in the Tropics, either of which leads to a more biased latent heat flux in NCEP2. Despite the significant biases in the NWP surface fields and the poor representation of short-time sea surface temperature variability, the NWP models are able to represent the dominant short-time variability in other basic variables and thus the variability in heat fluxes in the wintertime coastal regions of the western North Atlantic (on timescales of 3‐4 days and 1 week) and the northern and southern subtropical regions (on a timescale of about 2 weeks), but ECMWF and particularly the NCEP analyses do not represent well the 2‐3-week variability in the tropical Atlantic.