Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
A significant source of uncertainty in climate projections, as with other problems involving fluid flow, arises from the approximations made in subgrid scale closures for processes like convection, atmospheric gravity waves, and ocean eddies. These processes operate on smaller scales than can be explicitly resolved in global climate models. The move towards kilometer-scale modeling offers the potential to reduce some of these uncertainties.
The parameterization of convectively generated gravity waves plays a critical role in simulating the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), a large-scale oscillation in winds in the tropical stratosphere. Franke and Giorgetta [2024] use a 5-kilometer global model which does not include parameterizations for deep convection or gravity waves to demonstrate that it is capable of capturing a QBO-like oscillation. However, some features of the QBO, such as its downward propagation, are still absent. These findings underscore the ongoing challenge of calibrating the remaining parameterizations in kilometer-scale models.
Citation: Franke, H., & Giorgetta, M. A. (2024). Toward the direct simulation of the quasi-biennial oscillation in a global storm-resolving model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 16, e2024MS004381. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024MS004381
—Aditi Sheshadri, Associate Editor, JAMES