How well do the current state-of-the-art CMIP5 models characterise the climatology of the East Asian winter monsoon?

Abstract

Previous studies have revealed some common biases in coupled general circulation model's simulations of the East Asian (EA) winter monsoon (EAWM), including colder surface air temperature and more winter precipitation over the EA region. In this study, we exam- ined 41 fully coupled atmosphere-ocean models from fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), which will be widely used in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and address whether the current state-of-the-art CMIP5 models can characterise the climatology of the East Asian winter monsoon. We also compared the results with the models from third phase of CMIP, which was exten- sively used in the fourth assessment report of the IPCC. The results show that the cold surface air temperature (SAT) bias is lessened and the precipitation amount decreased with the current CMIP5 models. Moreover, the CMIP5 models performbetter at predicting surface winds and high-level jet streams than the CMIP3 models. More- over, CMIP5 models show more model consistency in most EAWM parameters, and the interannual variability of the SAT is closer to the observations. We also examined the change in the radiation energy budget in the CMIP5 models and compared with CMIP3 models. Although the improvements are significant, deficiencies still exist in the simulation of the EAWM, e.g., the stronger EA major trough and the stronger zonal sea level pressure gradient.