Long-Term Behavior of Cloud Systems in TOGA COARE and Their Interactions with Radiative and Surface Processes. Part III: Effects on the Energy Budget and SST

Abstract

Most atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs) and coupled atmosphere?ocean GCMs are unable to get the tropical energy budgets at the top of the atmosphere and the surface to simultaneously agree with observations. This aspect is investigated using a cloud-resolving model (CRM) that treats cloud-scale dynamics explicitly, a single-column model (SCM) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model that parameterizes convection and clouds, and observations made during Tropical Oceans and Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean?Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE). The same large-scale forcing and radiation parameterizations were used in both modeling approaches. We showed that the time-averaged top-of-atmosphere and surface energy budgets agree simultaneously with observations in a 30-day (5 December 1992?3 January 1993) cloud-resolving simulation of tropical cloud systems. The 30-day time-averaged energy budgets obtained from the CRM are within the observational accuracy of 10 W m?2, while the corresponding quantities derived from the SCM have large biases. The physical explanation for this difference is that the CRM realization explicitly represents cumulus convection, including its mesoscale organization, and produces vertical and horizontal distributions of cloud condensate (ice and liquid water) that interact much more realistically with radiation than do parameterized clouds in the SCM. The accuracy of the CRM-derived surface fluxes is also tested by using the fluxes to force a one-dimensional (1D) ocean model. The 1D model, together with the surface forcing from the CRM and the prescribed advection of temperature and salinity, simulates the long-term evolution and diurnal variation of the sea surface temperature. This suggests that the atmosphere?ocean coupling requires accurate representation of cloud-scale and mesoscale processes.