A New Regional Climate Model for POLAR‐CORDEX: Evaluation of a 30‐Year Hindcast with COSMO‐CLM² Over Antarctica

Abstract

Continent‐wide climate information over the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to obtain accurate information of present climate and reduce uncertainties of the ice sheet mass balance response and resulting global sea level rise to future climate change. In this study, the COSMO‐CLM2 Regional Climate Model is applied over the AIS and adapted for the specific meteorological and climatological conditions of the region. A 30‐year hindcast was performed and evaluated against observational records consisting of long‐term ground‐based meteorological observations, automatic weather stations, radiosoundings, satellite records, stake measurements and ice cores. Reasonable agreement regarding the surface and upper‐air climate is achieved by the COSMO‐CLM2 model, comparable to the performance of other state‐of‐the‐art climate models over the AIS. Meteorological variability of the surface climate is adequately simulated, and biases in the radiation and surface mass balance are small. The presented model therefore contributes as a new member to the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment project over the AIS (POLAR‐CORDEX) and the CORDEX‐CORE initiative.

Verification of the regional atmospheric model CCLM v5.0 with conventional data and lidar measurements in Antarctica

“…For sea ice data, daily sea ice concentration (SIC) is used. The data are based on AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer -for Earth Observing System) and AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2), and for data gaps SSMIS (Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder) satellite measurements (Spreen et al, 2008;Ezraty et al, 2007) are used. The resolution of the sea ice concentration data is 6.25 km for AMSR-E/AMSR2 but is coarser for SS-MIS (12.5 km).…”

Evaluation of regional climate models ALARO-0 and REMO2015 at 0.22° resolution over the CORDEX Central Asia domain

“…Coordinated sets of experiments were recently performed or are still ongoing for CORDEX regions such as South America (Solman et al, 2013), Central America (Fuentes-Franco et al, 2015), North America (Wang and Kotamarthi, 2015;Diaconescu et al, 2016;Whan and Zwiers, 2017), South Asia (Ghimire et al, 2018), East Asia (Zou et al, 2016), Southeast Asia (Tangang et al, 2018;Tangang et al, 2019;Tuyet et al, 2019), Australasia (Di Virgilio et al, 2019), Arctic (Koenigk et al, 2015), Antarctic (Souverijns et al, 2019) and Middle East North Africa (Almazroui et al, 2016;Bucchignani et al, 2018). In this paper we discuss the results of the simulations over the CAS-CORDEX domain.…”

“…While high-resolution ensembles (up to 12.5 km spatial resolution) are available for certain regions, e.g. EURO-CORDEX (Jacob et al, 2014), for other regions such as Australasia (Di Virgilio et al, 2019) and the Antarctic (Souverijns et al, 2019) the first experiments were performed only recently. For the CORDEX Central Asia (CAS-CORDEX) domain only a single climate run with the regional climate model (RCM) HadRM3P (Gordon et al, 2000) of the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) at a resolution of 0.44° was publicly available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) archive until 2019.…”

Impact of coastal East Antarctic ice rises on surface mass balance: insights from observations and modeling

“…RACMO2 is a state of the art regional atmospheric climate model, which similar to for example MAR (Agosta et al, 2019) and COSMO-CLM (Souverijns et al, 2019) is able to provide accurate SMB simulations in polar regions. RACMO2 was developed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorology Institute (KNMI) and combines the High Resolution Limited Area Model (HIRLAM, Undén et al (2002)) numerical weather prediction model with the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts Integrated Forecast System (ISF) physics (ECMWF, 2009;Noël et al, 2015;Lenaerts et al, 2012b)).…”