Understanding the alleviation of “Double-ITCZ” bias in CMIP6 models from the perspective of atmospheric energy balance

Abstract

The simulation of tropical precipitation has been a challenge to climate models. The multi-model ensemble mean of CMIP6 models only show limited improvement relative to the CMIP3 and CMIP5 models. However, a simple ensemble mean may mask the improvement of individual models. Here we evaluated 20 CMIP6 models and their corresponding earlier version in CMIP5. The results show that the CMIP6 models is significantly improved in the tropical precipitation compared to their counterparts in CMIP5, and the alleviation of bias mainly happened in the top ten model pairs with largest RMSE reduction (TOP10). For the mean of TOP10, the antisymmetric (symmetric) bias mode in CMIP5 is significantly reduced by 55% (78%). Further energetics evaluation shows that, the CMIP5-to-CMIP6 decrease of antisymmetric bias in the bulk of TOP10 models is accompanied by more realistic southward cross-equatorial atmospheric energy transport ($${AET}_{EQ}$$ AET EQ ), which is mainly contributed by the better representation of the extra-tropical surface turbulent flux ($$STF$$ STF ). On the other hand, the decrease in the symmetric bias of TOP10 models is associated with the enlargement of the negative bias in the seasonal contrast of $${AET}_{EQ}$$ AET EQ , which is caused by the alleviation of the biases in the seasonal contrast of extra-tropical $$STF$$ STF . Our analysis revealed the improvement in the simulation of tropical precipitation in CMIP6, and we pointed out that the improvement is associated with the model-generational changes in the simulated atmospheric energy balances.