Identification

Title

Role of the atmospheric mean state on the initiation of the Madden-Julian oscillation in a tropical channel model

Abstract

Tropical channel models, defined as models that are global in the zonal direction but bounded in the meridional direction, are particularly useful for simulating the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) and understanding its physical and dynamical basis. Influences from the extratropics through the lateral boundaries have been found to be essential to the reproduction of the initiation of certain MJO events. This led to a hypothesis that multi-year simulations using a tropical channel model would reproduce reasonable MJO statistics under the influence of prescribed lateral boundary conditions derived from global reanalyses. Interestingly, the MJO statistics in such a multi-year simulation by a high-resolution tropical channel model are not better than those from global climate models. The error in the atmospheric mean state is found to be a possible reason for the poor MJO statistics in the simulation. Nevertheless, even with a large error in the mean state, the multi-year simulation captures two MJO events previously found to be initiated by extratropical influences. However, the model does not reproduce a third event, whose initiation is not directly influenced by the extratropics. This implies that in the absence of dynamical interactions between the MJO and the lateral boundary conditions, the error in the mean state could be sufficient to prevent the MJO initiation. To explore this third MJO event further, a series of sensitivity tests are conducted. These tests show that the simulation of this event is neither critically influenced by the cumulus parameterization employed, nor the initial conditions when the model is integrated 2 weeks prior to the MJO initiation. The model captures this event when the MJO signal is already present in the initial conditions. The use of high-resolution sea surface temperature does not improve the simulation of the third MJO event. A higher-resolution nested domain covering the Indo-Pacific warm pool region and including a cloud-system resolving domain over the Indonesian Maritime Continent has little effect on the MJO initiation over the Indian Ocean. In <2 weeks the error in the simulation is comparable to the climate error. The role of the simulated MJO on the mean state is also explored. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7kk9d2j

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact