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Global climate internal variability in a 2000-year control simulation with Community Earth System Model (CESM)

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Abstract

Using the low-resolution (T31, equivalent to 3.75° × 3.75°) version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a global climate simulation was carried out with fixed external forcing factors (1850 Common Era. (C.E.) conditions) for the past 2000 years. Based on the simulated results, spatio-temporal structures of surface air temperature, precipitation and internal variability, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), were compared with reanalysis datasets to evaluate the model performance. The results are as follows: 1) CESM showed a good performance in the long-term simulation and no significant climate drift over the past 2000 years; 2) climatological patterns of global and regional climate changes simulated by the CESM were reasonable compared with the reanalysis datasets; and 3) the CESM simulated internal natural variability of the climate system performs very well. The model not only reproduced the periodicity of ENSO, AMO and PDO events but also the 3–8 years variability of the ENSO. The spatial distribution of the CESM-simulated NAO was also similar to the observed. However, because of weaker total irradiation and greenhouse gas concentration forcing in the simulation than the present, the model performances had some differences from the observations. Generally, the CESM showed a good performance in simulating the global climate and internal natural variability of the climate system. This paves the way for other forced climate simulations for the past 2000 years by using the CESM.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, 210008, China

    Zhiyuan Wang, Yao Li & Jian Liu

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Zhiyuan Wang & Yao Li

  3. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment of Ministry of Education, School of Geography Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Bin Liu & Jian Liu

Authors
  1. Zhiyuan Wang
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  2. Yao Li
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  3. Bin Liu
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  4. Jian Liu
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Correspondence to Jian Liu.

Additional information

Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2010CB950102), Strategic and Special Frontier Project of Science and Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA05080800), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41371209, 41420104002), Special Research Fund for Doctoral Discipline of Higher Education Institutions (No. 20133207110015), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (No. 14KJA170002), Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (No. 164320H101)

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Wang, Z., Li, Y., Liu, B. et al. Global climate internal variability in a 2000-year control simulation with Community Earth System Model (CESM). Chin. Geogr. Sci. 25, 263–273 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-015-0754-1

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