Annual mean surface air temperature response to a doubling of CO₂.  Upper left: equilibrated atmosphere/land response (GFDL AM2.1/LM2.1) with fixed seasonally varying sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea ice. Other plots are coupled model (CM2.1) responses in a single realization with CO₂ increasing at 1%/year till doubling (year 70) then held fixed.  Upper right — average over years 60-80, around the time of doubling; lower left — years 160-180; lower right — years 580-600.  Contour interval is 0.5C in upper left and 1C elsewhere.  Colors same in all plots.

Returning to our discussion of the time scales of the climatic response, it might be useful to take a closer look at the evolution of the warming in a GCM for the standard idealized scenario in which, starting from an equilibrated state, CO₂ is increased at 1% per year until it doubles and is then held fixed.  This plot shows the results from our CM2.1 model.

I want to focus especially on the upper left panel; the other panels are mainly included here to provide context. The upper left panel is not generated from the fully coupled model, but from the atmosphere/land components of this model in isolation, holding the sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice distribution fixed at their unperturbed climatological seasonal cycles, while doubling the CO₂.   This model equilibrates to a change in CO₂ in a couple of months (there is no interactive vegetation or even permafrost in this model, both of which would create the potential for longer time scales regionally).  The response depends on the season, so one has to integrate for at least a year before this annual mean pattern emerges.  We might call this the ultra-fast response, distinguishing it from fast (oceanic mixed layer), slow (oceanic interior), and ultra-slow (anything slower than the thermal adjustment time of the interior ocean, such as aspects of glacier dynamics).  One can visualize this as the first step in the response, but one that is evidently dramatically modified over time by the ocean warming and sea ice retreat.

Read the rest of this entry »

The number of Atlantic hurricanes simulated by the model of Zhao et al 2009, when boundary conditions are altered to correspond to the changes in sea surface temperature (SST) simulated in 8 of the CMIP3/AR4 models for the A1B scenario by the end of the 21st century (small red dots), and to the ensemble mean of the changes in SST in 18 CMIP3/AR4 models (big red dot).  The horizontal line indicates the number of hurricanes/yr  in the control simulation.

These results, and the discussion that follows, are based on collaborative work with Ming Zhao, Gabriel Vecchi, Tom Knutson and other GFDL colleagues. (Some of the model runs utilized here were discussed in  Zhao et al 2009 and Vecchi et al 2011, — the full set will be discussed in a forthcoming paper.)

Given the global atmospheric/land model described in post #2, which appears to simulate certain aspects of the statistics of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic quite well, what does the model predict for the change in these statistics in the future?  And how seriously should we take the result?

Read the rest of this entry »