Impact of having realistic tropical cyclone frequency on ocean heat content and transport forecasts in a high-resolution coupled model

This study examines two sets of high‐resolution coupled model forecasts starting from no‐tropical cyclone (TC) and correct‐TC‐statistics initial conditions to understand the role of TC events on climate prediction. While the model with no‐TC initial conditions can quickly spin‐up TCs within a week,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical research letters 2015-07, Vol.42 (14), p.5966-5973
Main Authors: Zhang, S., Zhao, M., Lin, S.-J., Yang, X., Anderson, W., Zhang, W., Rosati, A., Underwood, S., Zeng, F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate
Climate prediction
Climatology
Convection
Cyclones
Enthalpy
Fluxes
Frameworks
Heat
Heat content
Heat transport
High resolution
Hurricanes
Initial conditions
Interactions
Joining
Marine
Mathematical models
Meridional heat transport
Northern Hemisphere
Ocean mixing
Ocean surface
Oceans
Resolution
Sea surface
Sea surface temperature
Southern Hemisphere
Statistical methods
Statistics
Surface temperature
Temperature
Temperature effects
Transport
Tropical climate
tropical cyclone statistics
Tropical cyclones
Weather
Weather forecasting
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Summary:This study examines two sets of high‐resolution coupled model forecasts starting from no‐tropical cyclone (TC) and correct‐TC‐statistics initial conditions to understand the role of TC events on climate prediction. While the model with no‐TC initial conditions can quickly spin‐up TCs within a week, the initial conditions with a corrected TC distribution can produce more accurate forecast of sea surface temperature up to 1.5 months and maintain larger ocean heat content up to 6 months due to enhanced mixing from continuous interactions between initialized and forecasted TCs and the evolving ocean states. The TC‐enhanced tropical ocean mixing strengthens the meridional heat transport in the Southern Hemisphere driven primarily by Southern Ocean surface Ekman fluxes but weakens the Northern Hemisphere poleward transport in this model. This study suggests a future plausible initialization procedure for seamless weather‐climate prediction when individual convection‐permitting cyclone initialization is incorporated into this TC‐statistics‐permitting framework. Key Points TCs play an important role in climate prediction TCs enhance tropical ocean mixing and affect ocean heat transport TCs in initial conditions help forecast more accurate SST
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007
DOI:10.1002/2015GL064745