Feb 20, 2015
North Atlantic Storm-Track Sensitivity to Warming Increases with Model Resolution
by
,
American Meteorological Society
- States that mesoscale condensational heating can increase the sensitivity of modeled extratropical cyclogenesis to horizontal resolution
- Presents a pseudo global warming experiment to investigate how this heating-enhanced sensitivity to resolution changes in a warmer and thus moister atmosphere
- Uses the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with 120- and 20-km grid spacing to simulate current and future climates
- Finds that the North Atlantic storm-track response to global warming is amplified at the higher model resolution
- Finds the most dramatic changes occur over the northeastern Atlantic, where resolution typical of current general circulation models (GCMs) results in a smaller global warming response in comparison with that in the 20-km simulations
- Results suggest that caution is warranted when interpreting projections from coarse-resolution GCMs of future cyclone activity over the northeastern Atlantic