Indian Ocean Climate and Dipole Variability in Hadley Centre Coupled GCMs

Abstract

Prediction of Indian Ocean interannual variability may be limited by the systematic biases in coupled GCMs or by a lack of resolution of the processes involved. In particular, little is known about the impact of ocean resolution on simulated climate variability. The simulation of Indian Ocean climate and dipole is investigated in Hadley Centre coupled models with different horizontal and vertical ocean resolutions. The mean state of the Indian Ocean is found to improve only slightly when horizontal resolution is increased from 1.25° to ?° and when vertical resolution is increased from 20 to 40 vertical levels due to a small reduction of the Maritime Continent warm bias. However, improvements in the simulation of the dipole are more substantial. All versions of the model realistically simulate dipole onset between April and June, peak in September to October, and then rapidly decay between October and January. The SST anomalies are accompanied by realistic equatorial easterly wind anomalies with thermocline shoaling in the east and deepening in the southwest. In the model with the 1.25° ocean and 20 vertical levels, the dipoles do not terminate completely but persist through the austral summer and then frequently reinvigorate the following year. This unrealistic behavior is eliminated when the ocean vertical resolution is increased from around 20 m in the thermocline to 10 m in the whole of the top 135 m and when Java is represented (even at 1.25° resolution). It is hypothesized that the improvement is due to the resolution of the separation between the thermocline and the surface and also due to the small reduction of the Maritime Continent warm bias.