Comparison of ocean physical and biogeochemical mean state and climate sensitivity across ocean model resolution from 100 km to 10 km

Abstract:

One of the representational aspirations driving current Earth System Model development is to capture the global ocean mesoscale (i.e. ocean weather) in coupled carbon-climate. The present study explores a the role of ocean model resolution (100 km to 10 km) on baseline physical and biogeochemical simulation characteristics and their response to climate change. We find the high resolution model to improve the representation of boundary currents and mesoscale phenomena, and to eliminate fictitious current structures that plague the coarse resolution models. Along with these expected improvements of smaller scales however, we also find a general lack of improvement in many of the large scale biases. With respect to sensitivity, we find the high resolution model to restrict ocean heat uptake towards the surface ocean and to exhibit somewhat less structure at the regional scale than the coarse resolution model. We find similarly more uniform patterns of carbon uptake and biogeochemicel response at high resolution consistent with a greater tendency in the high resolution model to accommodate change in the major current structures, and suggesting that some of the highly regional structure observed among CMIP5 models is due to their inability to represent the role of the mesoscale on the regional scale.