Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Long-range forecasts of winter weather over Europe and the North Atlantic show surprising skill on seasonal and longer timescales. The reasons for this extended predictability are not fully understood. On the one hand, it is known that the temperature of tropical oceans can imprint on the atmosphere, giving rise to predictable signals in weather statistics in the extra tropics. However, the potential additional role of extra tropical oceans is less clear.
Wills et al. [2024] show that ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic can lead to a strong local response in the wintertime atmospheric circulation, provided the atmosphere is represented in prediction models with enough detail. Since we can predict the evolution of the North Atlantic many years in advance, this has important implications for predictability of the weather in this region on seasonal and longer timescales. It also helps us understand known issues with weather variability in climate models, which typically represent the atmosphere with much less detail.
This study clearly demonstrates the role of atmospheric resolution in the representation of North Atlantic and European winter weather. However, realizing the expected improvements in climate simulations will also require an accurate representation of the ocean temperature patterns which force the atmosphere. To achieve this, we need to better understand and represent ocean variability. This is a question at the heart of international initiatives such as the €10 million Horizon Europe project European Eddy-Rich ESMs (EERIE) and the CMIP7 HighResMIP2 initiative. Studies such as Wills et al. [2024] help us understand the relative roles of the atmosphere and ocean in weather variability in the North Atlantic, guiding model developers as they seek to further improve the skill of our predictive models.
Citation: Wills, R. C. J., Herrington, A. R., Simpson, I. R., & Battisti, D. S. (2024). Resolving weather fronts increases the large-scale circulation response to Gulf Stream SST anomalies in variable-resolution CESM2 simulations. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 16, e2023MS004123. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023MS004123
—Hannah Christensen, Associate Editor, JAMES
Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
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