Discrepancies between observations and climate models of large-scale wind-driven Greenland melt influence sea-level rise projections

While climate models project that Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) melt will continue to accelerate with climate change, models exhibit limitations in capturing observed connections between GrIS melt and changes in high-latitude atmospheric circulation. Here we impose observed Arctic winds in a fully-coupled climate model with fixed anthropogenic forcing to quantify the influence of the rotational component of large-scale atmospheric circulation variability over the Arctic on the temperature field and the surface mass/energy balances through adiabatic processes. We show that recent changes involving mid-to-upper-tropospheric anticyclonic wind anomalies – linked with tropical forcing – explain half of the observed Greenland surface warming and ice loss acceleration since 1990, suggesting a pathway for large-scale winds to potentially enhance sea-level rise by ~0.2 mm/year per decade. We further reveal fingerprints of this observed teleconnection in paleo-reanalyses spanning the past 400 years, which heightens concern about model limitations to capture wind-driven adiabatic processes associated with GrIS melt

Sensitivity analysis of different parameterization schemes using RegCM4.3 for the Carpathian region

In order to quantify the impact of the use of different parameterization schemes on regional climate model outputs, hindcast experiments have been completed applying the Regional Climate Model version 4.3 (RegCM4.3) for the Carpathian region and its surroundings at 10-km horizontal resolution with three different cumulus convection schemes. Besides, the sensitivity of outputs for subgrid-scale processes is also studied by activating the subgrid Biosphere-Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS) model within other RegCM experiments. Among the analyzed factors, RegCM is most sensitive to the applied convection scheme. The impact of closure assumption related to the used convective parameterization is secondary, while the use of subgridding has less influence on the outputs. RegCM4.3 results show improved performance over our previous model simulations but still have larger amplitude for annual precipitation cycle than the measurement-based reference data. Our validation results for temperature and precipitation suggest that for the selected region, the overall best performance is achieved when using the mixed Grell-Emanuel scheme together with Fritsch and Chappell closure