Seasonal Surface Air Temperature and Precipitation in the FSU Climate Model Coupled to the CLM2

Abstract

The current Florida State University (FSU) climate model is upgraded by coupling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Land Model Version 2 (CLM2) as its land component in order to make a better simulation of surface air temperature and precipitation on the seasonal time scale, which is important for crop model application. Climatological and seasonal simulations with the FSU climate model coupled to the CLM2 (hereafter FSUCLM) are compared to those of the control (the FSU model with the original simple land surface treatment). The current version of the FSU model is known to have a cold bias in the temperature field and a wet bias in precipitation. The implementation of FSUCLM has reduced or eliminated this bias due to reduced latent heat flux and increased sensible heat flux. The role of the land model in seasonal simulations is shown to be more important during summertime than wintertime. An additional experiment that assimilates atmospheric forcings produces improved land-model initial conditions, which in turn reduces the biases further. The impact of various deep convective parameterizations is examined as well to further assess model performance. The land scheme plays a more important role than the convective scheme in simulations of surface air temperature. However, each convective scheme shows its own advantage over different geophysical locations in precipitation simulations.