Abstract
AbstractWe estimate the extent of spatial scales that atmospheric models in a new generation of global climate models, used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6, are able to resolve on the basis of kinetic energy spectra, commonly referred to as the effective resolution. We examine the spectra derived from the rotational and divergent parts of the wind for six state‐of‐the‐art global climate models that have been run with at least two horizontal resolutions. For each of the high resolution configurations, the effective resolution enhancement is less than proportional to the increase of the nominal resolution. The highest effective resolution obtained by the models in this study is roughly 200 km. This shows that the newest generation of high resolution climate models starts to resolve synoptic scales relevant for the dynamics of weather events.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen a great improvement of atmospheric numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models
Ongoing efforts spent in model development and the increase of computational power have led to improved fidelity in the simulation of global atmospheric dynamics in numerical models (Bauer et al, 2015)
We have determined the effective resolution for a set of current state-of-the-art climate models
Summary
Recent decades have seen a great improvement of atmospheric numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models. Ongoing efforts spent in model development and the increase of computational power have led to improved fidelity in the simulation of global atmospheric dynamics in numerical models (Bauer et al, 2015). Resolution increases broaden the range of scales that are resolved, which can subsequently be used for studying atmospheric dynamics. The range of the resolved scales can be indicated by the smallest scale that is plausibly represented in the model, which is commonly referred to as the effective resolution. In this study we take the same approach to determine the effective resolution for a set of state-of-the-art global climate models
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