A New Regional Climate Model for POLAR‐CORDEX: Evaluation of a 30‐Year Hindcast with COSMO‐CLM2 Over Antarctica

Continent‐wide climate information over the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to obtain accurate information of present climate and reduce uncertainties of the ice sheet mass balance response and resulting global sea level rise to future climate change. In this study, the COSMO‐CLM2 Regional Cl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of geophysical research. Atmospheres 2019-02, Vol.124 (3), p.1405-1427
Main Authors: Souverijns, N., Gossart, A., Demuzere, M., Lenaerts, J. T. M., Medley, B., Gorodetskaya, I. V., Vanden Broucke, S., Lipzig, N. P. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antarctic climate
Antarctic ice sheet
Antarctica
Atmospheric models
Automatic weather stations
Climate change
Climate models
Climate variability
Climatology
Computer simulation
Cores
Evaluation
Future climates
Geophysics
Glaciation
Global sea level
Ground-based observation
Ice
Ice cores
Mass balance
Mass balance of ice sheets
Meteorological observations
POLAR‐CORDEX
Radiation
Records
Regional analysis
regional climate model
Regional climate models
Regional climates
Satellite observation
Satellites
Sea level
Sea level changes
Sea level rise
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Summary:Continent‐wide climate information over the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to obtain accurate information of present climate and reduce uncertainties of the ice sheet mass balance response and resulting global sea level rise to future climate change. In this study, the COSMO‐CLM2 Regional Climate Model is applied over the AIS and adapted for the specific meteorological and climatological conditions of the region. A 30‐year hindcast was performed and evaluated against observational records consisting of long‐term ground‐based meteorological observations, automatic weather stations, radiosoundings, satellite records, stake measurements and ice cores. Reasonable agreement regarding the surface and upper‐air climate is achieved by the COSMO‐CLM2 model, comparable to the performance of other state‐of‐the‐art climate models over the AIS. Meteorological variability of the surface climate is adequately simulated, and biases in the radiation and surface mass balance are small. The presented model therefore contributes as a new member to the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment project over the AIS (POLAR‐CORDEX) and the CORDEX‐CORE initiative. Key Points A long‐term integration with the COSMO‐CLM2 Regional Climate Model for the Antarctic is presented Climate representation performance is comparable to state‐of‐the‐art models The simulation is a contribution to CORDEX over Antarctica (POLAR‐CORDEX) and CORDEX‐CORE
ISSN:2169-897X
2169-8996
DOI:10.1029/2018JD028862