Southern Hemisphere Jet Variability in the IPSL GCM at Varying Resolutions

Abstract

Abstract Fluctuations of the Southern Hemisphere eddy-driven jet are studied in a suite of experiments with the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, version 4 (LMDZ4) atmospheric GCM with varying horizontal resolution, in coupled mode and with imposed SSTs. The focus is on the relationship between changes in the mean state brought by increasing resolution, and the intraseasonal variability and response to increasing CO2 concentration. In summer, the mean jet latitude moves poleward when the resolution increases in latitude, converging toward the observed one. Most measures of the jet dynamics, such as skewness of the distribution or persistence time scale of jet movements, exhibit a simple dependence on the mean jet latitude and also converge to the observed values. In winter, the improvement of the mean-state biases with resolution is more limited. In both seasons, the relationship between the dominant mode of variability—the southern annular mode (SAM)—and the mean state remains the same as in observations, except in the most biased winter simulation. The jet fluctuations—latitude shifts or splitting—just occur around a different mean position. Both the model biases and the response to increasing CO2 project strongly onto the SAM structure. No systematic relation between the amplitude of the response and characteristics of the control simulation was found, possibly due to changing dynamics or impacts of the physical parameterizations with different resolutions.