CO2- and Aerosol-Induced Changes in Vertically Integrated Zonal Momentum Budget in a GCM Experiment

Abstract

The German Climate Computing Center recently conducted a model experiment in which separate runs simulate the climatic response to increasing CO2 alone and to increasing CO2 together with direct radiative forcing by sulfate aerosols. One of the variables that shows interesting differences between the different runs is the near-surface zonal-mean zonal wind. As compared with the control run, the midlatitude surface westerlies intensify and shift poleward in the CO2-only run in both hemispheres in both the northern winter (DJF) and summer (JJA). However, the aerosol forcing moderates these changes in general and, in particular, reverses the pattern of change in the Northern Hemisphere in JJA. Consistent differences between the various runs occur in the meridional distribution of sea level pressure. The origin of these simulated changes is studied by using the vertically integrated zonal-mean zonal momentum budget, utilizing the intimate linkage between the low-level wind and the surface stress and the close time-mean balance between the surface stress and the other terms in the budget. Regardless of the forcing used, momentum convergence in transient eddies is found to be the dominant agent of change in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere and in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes in JJA. In particular, the changes in the contribution of high-pass transients are relatively large and they seem to be qualitatively traceable to the changes in the tropospheric meridional temperature gradient. In the northern extratropics in DJF, stationary eddies make an even larger contribution than the transients.