A regional atmosphere-ocean climate system model (CCLMv5.0clm7-NEMOv3.3-NEMOv3.6)over Europe including three marginal seas on its stability and performance

2019 - Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 5077–5095, 2019

Author:

Primo, C.

Additional authors:

Kelemen, F.D., Feldmann, H., Akhtar, N., Ahrens, B.

DOI:

10.5194/gmd-12-5077-2019

Description:

The frequency of extreme events has changed, having a direct impact on human lives. Regional climate models help us to predict these regional climate changes. This work presents an atmosphere–ocean coupled regional climate system model (RCSM; with the atmospheric component COSMO-CLM and the ocean component NEMO) over the European domain, including three marginal seas: the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Sea. To test the model, we evaluate a simulation of more than 100 years (1900–2009) with a spatial grid resolution of about 25 km. The simulation was nested into a coupled global simulation with the model MPI-ESM in a low-resolution configuration, whose ocean temperature and salinity were nudged to the ocean–ice component of the MPI-ESM forced with the NOAA 20th Century Reanalysis (20CR). The evaluation shows the robustness of the RCSM and discusses the added value by the coupled marginal seas over an atmosphere-only simulation. The coupled system is stable for the complete 20th century and provides a better representation of extreme temperatures compared to the atmosphere-only model. The produced long-term dataset will help us to better understand the processes leading to meteorological and climate extremes.