Abstract:

This dataset contains sea surface temperature (SST), wind stress, and equivalent-neutral 10-m wind velocity outputs from two numerical experiments conducted with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate System Model Version 4 (CCSM4), run using horizontal ocean resolutions of 1° (LR, eddy-parameterized) and 0.1° (HR, eddy-resolving). More specifically, the CCSM4 is a global climate simulation model composed of the Community Land Model (CLM), the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM), the Los Alamos Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ocean general circulation model, and the Community Ice Code (CICE), that exchange state information and fluxes via a coupler. The HR and LR experiments are performed using atmospheric models configured to the same 0.5° x 0.625° latitude/longitude grid, but ocean models of contrasting horizontal resolutions. In LR, the ocean component uses an asymmetric dipolar grid with zonal resolution of 1.125°, and meridional resolution increasing from 0.27° near the equator until a maximum of 0.54° at midlatitudes, unable to resolve baroclinic instability processes and mesoscale ocean eddies, while the HR uses a tripolar ocean grid with a ~0.1° resolution that allows eddy formation and evolution. The LR (HR) experiment is initialized from a 255-year (155-year) control run with fixed 1990 C02 forcing, where fluxes at the air-sea interface are calculated at 3-hour (6-hour) intervals using state variables from the atmospheric model linearly interpolated onto the oceanic grid. The updated fluxes are then conservatively remapped to the native grid of each CCSM4 component model, and used in the integration of the subsequent time step. The LR and HR are both integrated for a period of 14 years, with daily-averaged outputs saved every 2 and 5 days, respectively. This dataset holds zonal-temporal diagrams of SST and wind stress retrieved from the atmospheric grid, also including estimates of the equivalent-neutral 10-m wind velocity vector computed from the model's wind stress data. The simulations were performed using computational resources provided by the Climate Simulation Laboratory at NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, and by the University of Miami Center for Computational Science.

Suggested Citation:

Leo Siqueira, Benjamin Kirtman. 2018. Cross-spectral analysis of the sea surface temperature 10-m wind speed coupling resolved by satellite products and climate model simulations. Distributed by: GRIIDC, Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. doi:10.7266/N70R9N1Q

Publications:

Laurindo, L. C., Siqueira, L., Mariano, A. J., & Kirtman, B. P. (2018). Cross-spectral analysis of the SST/10-m wind speed coupling resolved by satellite products and climate model simulations. Climate Dynamics, 52(9-10), 5071–5098. doi:10.1007/s00382-018-4434-6

Purpose:

To evaluate the role of resolved mesoscale ocean phenomena for conditioning the spectral linear relationship between low-level atmospheric winds and SST anomalies revealed by satellite observations.

Data Parameters and Units:

Data is divided in two major folders (HR and LR) that represent the experiments. The files are reorganized in zonal-temporal diagrams for each latitude of the atmospheric model grid, saved in netCDF files. The filenames represent the latitude (e.g., xt_2_115N.nc, latitude = 2.115N). Also included in this dataset is the file "basin_mask.nc", which holds the masks for the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Ocean basins, used in the for selecting data used in the cross-spectral analyzes. The variables within the files holding the zonal-temporal diagrams (xt_*.nc) are: Latitude (lat, degrees N), Longitude (degrees E), Time (day number since 0000/0/0, 365-day calendar), Sea Surface Temperature (sst_xt, degrees Celsius), Zonal equivalent-neutral 10-m wind velocity (uwnd_xt, m/s), Meridional equivalent-neutral 10-m wind velocity (vwnd_xt , m/s), Zonal wind stress (xtau_xt, N.m-2), Meridional wind stress (ytau_xt, N.m-2). The variables within "basin_mask.nc" are: Latitude (tlatM, degrees E), Longitude (tlotM, degrees N), Basin masks (maskM where 3 = Indian, 4 = Pacific, 5 = Atlantic, -999 = no data flag).

Provenance and Historical References:

Gent, P. R., G. Danabasoglu, L. J. Donner, M. M. Holland, E. C. Hunke, S. R. Jayne, D. M. Lawrence, R. B. Neale, P. J. Rasch, M. Vertenstein, P. H. Worley, Z.-L. Yang, and M. Zhang (2011). The Community Climate System Model Version 4. Journal of Climate 24, 4973–4991. https://doi.org/10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1. Laurindo, L. C., A. J. Mariano, and R. Lumpkin (2017). An improved near-surface velocity climatology for the global ocean from drifter observations. Deep-Sea Research I 124, 73–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2017.04.009.

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