@article{2051a3da15ad48abb98c2a4ee06d96ea,
title = "Impact of surface coupling grids on tropical cyclone extremes in high-resolution atmospheric simulations",
abstract = "This paper discusses the sensitivity of tropical cyclone climatology to surface coupling strategy in high-resolution configurations of the Community Earth System Model. Using two supported model setups, we demonstrate that the choice of grid on which the lowest model level wind stress and surface fluxes are computed may lead to differences in cyclone strength in multi-decadal climate simulations, particularly for the most intense cyclones. Using a deterministic framework, we show that when these surface quantities are calculated on an ocean grid that is coarser than the atmosphere, the computed frictional stress is misaligned with wind vectors in individual atmospheric grid cells. This reduces the effective surface drag, and results in more intense cyclones when compared to a model configuration where the ocean and atmosphere are of equivalent resolution. Our results demonstrate that the choice of computation grid for atmosphere-ocean interactions is non-negligible when considering climate extremes at high horizontal resolution, especially when model components are on highly disparate grids.",
author = "Zarzycki, {Colin M.} and Reed, {Kevin A.} and Bacmeister, {Julio T.} and Craig, {Anthony P.} and Bates, {Susan C.} and Rosenbloom, {Nan A.}",
note = "Funding Information: The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to thank John E. Truesdale for assistance in performing the simulations. Resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357, were used for this research. An award of computer time was provided by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Computing resources (ark:/85065/d7wd3xhc) were also provided by the Climate Simulation Laboratory at NCAR''s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and other agencies. Furthermore, this work utilizes part of the {"}Using Petascale Computing Capabilities to Address Climate Change Uncertainties{"} PRAC allocation support by the National Science Foundation ACI-1036146. This work is also part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Bacmeister was partially supported through the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program funded by US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Bates and Rosenbloom were supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the US Department of Energy, Office of Science (BER), Cooperative Agreement DE-FC02-97ER62402. IBTrACS data were freely obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs/). Model data from all simulations in this paper are archived and available at NCAR upon request through the authors. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Author(s) 2016.",
year = "2016",
month = feb,
day = "25",
doi = "10.5194/gmd-9-779-2016",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "9",
pages = "779--788",
journal = "Geoscientific Model Development",
issn = "1991-959X",
publisher = "Copernicus Gesellschaft mbH",
number = "2",
}