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The Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O) relaxation oscillation that governed glacial climate variability during marine isotope stage 3 has been accurately simulated using a high-resolution coupled climate model. Here the authors present additional detailed analyses of both the slow physics transition between warm and cold states and the fast physics transition between cold and warm states of the D-O cycle. First, the authors demonstrate that the mechanisms active during the slow transition from interstadial to stadial conditions involves the continuous flux of thick and old sea ice from the Arctic basin into the North Atlantic subpolar gyre region along the East Greenland Current. During this slow physical process, the freshwater input from sea ice melting as it moves over the surface of the warm ocean restratifies the high-latitude North Atlantic and leads to a significant reduction in the rate of North Atlantic Deep Water formation. A detailed freshwater budget and hydrography analysis is also presented to demonstrate that the D-O cycle is a low-latitude–high-latitude salt oscillator as the authors have previously argued. Second, the authors provide a more detailed analysis than previously of the fast-time-scale processes that govern the extremely rapid transition from cold stadial conditions back to the warm interstadial state. These are associated with the onset of a sub-sea ice thermohaline convective instability, which opens a massive polynya to the north of the southern boundary of the extensive North Atlantic sea ice lid that is characteristic of stadial conditions. This instability is enabled by the continuous increase of salinity above the sub-sea ice pycnocline, which eliminates the vertical salinity gradient that prevents convective destabilization of the water column under full stadial conditions. This reduction in the vertical salinity gradient beneath the sea ice lid results from the continuing northward salt transport by the North Atlantic gyre circulation once the expansion of the stadial sea ice lid has ceased. The onset of instability occurs in the Irminger basin to the south of Denmark Strait, and the authors discuss the reason for this localization of instability onset.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ∼ 21 000 years ago) has been a major focus for evaluating how well state-of-the-art climate models simulate climate changes as large as those expected in the future using paleoclimate reconstructions. A new generation of climate models has been used to generate LGM simulations as part of the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) contribution to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). Here, we provide a preliminary analysis and evaluation of the results of these LGM experiments (PMIP4, most of which are PMIP4-CMIP6) and compare them with the previous generation of simulations (PMIP3, most of which are PMIP3-CMIP5). We show that the global averages of the PMIP4 simulations span a larger range in terms of mean annual surface air temperature and mean annual precipitation compared to the PMIP3-CMIP5 simulations, with some PMIP4 simulations reaching a globally colder and drier state. However, the multi-model global cooling average is similar for the PMIP4 and PMIP3 ensembles, while the multi-model PMIP4 mean annual precipitation average is drier than the PMIP3 one. There are important differences in both atmospheric and oceanic circulations between the two sets of experiments, with the northern and southern jet streams being more poleward and the changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation being less pronounced in the PMIP4-CMIP6 simulations than in the PMIP3-CMIP5 simulations. Changes in simulated precipitation patterns are influenced by both temperature and circulation changes. Differences in simulated climate between individual models remain large. Therefore, although there are differences in the average behaviour across the two ensembles, the new simulation results are not fundamentally different from the PMIP3-CMIP5 results. Evaluation of large-scale climate features, such as land–sea contrast and polar amplification, confirms that the models capture these well and within the uncertainty of the paleoclimate reconstructions. Nevertheless, regional climate changes are less well simulated: the models underestimate extratropical cooling, particularly in winter, and precipitation changes. These results point to the utility of using paleoclimate simulations to understand the mechanisms of climate change and evaluate model performance.

The Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) is employed to dynamically downscale global warming projections produced using the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). The analyses are focused on the Great Lakes Basin of North America and the climate change projections extend from the instrumental period (1979–2001) to midcentury (2050–60) at a spatial resolution of 10 km. Because WRF does not currently include a sufficiently realistic lake component, simulations are performed using lake water temperature provided by D.V. Mironov’s freshwater lake model “FLake” forced by atmospheric fields from the global simulations. Results for the instrumental era are first compared with observations to evaluate the ability of the lake model to provide accurate lake water temperature and ice cover and to analyze the skill of the regional model. It is demonstrated that the regional model, with its finer resolution and more comprehensive physics, provides significantly improved results compared to those obtained from the global model. It much more accurately captures the details of the annual cycle and spatial pattern of precipitation. In particular, much more realistic lake-induced precipitation and snowfall patterns downwind of the lakes are predicted. The midcentury projection is analyzed to determine the impact of downscaling on regional climate changes. The emphasis in this final phase of the analysis is on the impact of climate change on winter snowfall in the lee of the lakes. It is found that future changes in lake surface temperature and ice cover under warmer conditions may locally increase snowfall as a result of increased evaporation and the enhanced lake effect.

This study provides the first comprehensive assessment of Regional Climate Model version 4.6.1 (RegCM4) for the Tibetan Plateau (TP) region. A wide range of model configurations were analyzed with different parameterizations employed to represent cumulus convection (Kuo, Grell, Emanuel, Kain, and Tiedtke), land surface processes (BATS and CLM), planetary boundary layer turbulence (Holtslag and UW PBL), and radiation (CCM3 and RRTM). In addition to the above experiments at a 30-km horizontal resolution, another experiment was conducted based upon the use of a double-nested dynamic downscaling method to construct a simulation at a 10-km resolution to study the sensitivity to the model resolution. We evaluated a 20-year simulation for precipitation, cloud cover, surface radiation budget, 2-m air temperature, and the surface atmospheric circulation against ground and satellite-based observations during the period 1989–2008. Among the factors analyzed regarding sensitivity, precipitation was unsurprisingly found to be sensitive to the cumulus parameterization scheme, and the CLM is found to reduce rainfall compared with BATS, which is satisfactory for both the Emanuel and Tiedtke schemes. Compared with the cumulus convection schemes, the cloud cover and surface radiation budget are sensitive to the land surface, PBL, and radiation schemes. Generally, the CLM is characterized by reduced mean cloud cover and enhanced surface longwave and shortwave radiation compared with BATS. Conversely, the UW PBL and RRTM radiation schemes result in increased cloud cover and less surface radiation compared with the default options in RegCM4. All experiments, except those employing the Kuo scheme, represent the mean 2-m air temperature and regional circulation patterns reasonably well. At the basin scale, the seasonal cycle and interannual variations of precipitation are found to be not well depicted by most model configurations, although the temperature field was well reproduced. Considering all the analyzed variables collectively, the Tiedtke scheme combined with the CLM land surface model is demonstrated to provide the best performance over the TP. However, the higher-resolution version of the model improves the precipitation simulation significantly, particularly in the Brahmaputra river basin, which is located in the north of the Himalayas.

Despite tectonic conditions and atmospheric CO 2 levels ( pCO 2 ) similar to those of present-day, geological reconstructions from the mid-Pliocene (3.3-3.0 Ma) document high lake levels in the Sahel and mesic conditions in subtropical Eurasia, suggesting drastic reorganizations of subtropical terrestrial hydroclimate during this interval. Here, using a compilation of proxy data and multi-model paleoclimate simulations, we show that the mid-Pliocene hydroclimate state is not driven by direct CO 2 radiative forcing but by a loss of northern high-latitude ice sheets and continental greening. These ice sheet and vegetation changes are long-term Earth system feedbacks to elevated pCO 2 . Further, the moist conditions in the Sahel and subtropical Eurasia during the mid-Pliocene are a product of enhanced tropospheric humidity and a stationary wave response to the surface warming pattern, which varies strongly with land cover changes. These findings highlight the potential for amplified terrestrial hydroclimate responses over long timescales to a sustained CO 2 forcing. In contrast to future projections, paleoclimate records often find wetter subtropics in tandem with elevated CO 2 . Here, a compilation of proxies and simulations are used to reveal the climate dynamics and feedbacks responsible for generating wet subtropics during the mid-Pliocene.

During the most recent deglaciation, the upwards trend of warmer Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures was punctuated by a rapid and intense return to glacial conditions: the Younger Dryas (YD). The end of this event marks the beginning of the Holocene. Using the University of Toronto version of CCSM4, a model of the climate prior to the YD was created with correct boundary conditions. Various amounts of freshwater forcing were then applied to the Beaufort Gyre for forcing intervals ranging from 1 to 125 years. In several cases, this was sufficient to collapse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and cause significant cooling over the NH. Crucially, after the forcing was ceased, the AMOC stayed in an off state for approximately a millennium before mounting a rapid recover to pre-YD levels. This recovery, which permanently reduced the extent of NH sea ice, occurred through the mechanism of a Polynya opening in the Irminger Sea during winter and led to a pronounced “overshoot” of the AMOC, during which NH temperatures were higher than before the YD.

The Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project Phase 2 (PlioMIP2) is an international collaboration to simulate the climate of the mid-Pliocene interglacial, corresponding to marine isotope stage KM5c (3.205 Mya), using a wide selection of climate models with the objective of understanding the nature of the warming that is known to have occurred during the broader mid-Pliocene warm period. PlioMIP2 builds on the successes of PlioMIP by shifting the focus to a specific interglacial and using a revised set of geographic and orbital boundary conditions. In this paper, we present the details of the mid-Pliocene simulations that we have performed with a slightly modified version of the Community Climate System Model version 4 (CCSM4) and the enhanced variant of the PlioMIP2 boundary conditions. We discuss the simulated climatology through comparisons to our control simulations and to proxy reconstructions of the mid-Pliocene climate. With the new boundary conditions, the University of Toronto version of the CCSM4 model simulates a mid-Pliocene that is more than twice as warm as that with the boundary conditions used for PlioMIP Phase 1. The warming is more enhanced near the high latitudes, which is where most of the changes to the PlioMIP2 boundary conditions have been made. The elevated warming in the high latitudes leads to a better match between the simulated climatology and proxy-based reconstructions than possible with the previous version of the boundary conditions.

We present results from our investigation into the physical mechanisms through which the mid-Pliocene, with a pCO2 of only  ∼  400 ppmv, could have supported the same magnitude of global warmth as has been projected for the climate at the end of the 21st century when pCO2 is expected to be 3 times higher. These mechanisms allow us to understand the warming in terms of changes to the radiative properties of the surface, the clouds, greenhouse gases, and changes to the meridional heat transport. We find that two-thirds of the warming pervasive during the mid-Pliocene, compared to the preindustrial, could be attributed to the reduction in the planetary emissivity owing to the higher concentrations of the greenhouse gases CO2 and water vapor, and the remaining one-third to the reduction in planetary albedo. We also find that changes to the orography and the pCO2 are the leading causes of the warming with each contributing in roughly equal parts to a total of 87 % of the warming and changes to the polar ice sheets responsible for the remaining warming. Furthermore, we provide a mid-Pliocene perspective on ongoing efforts to understand the climate system's sensitivity at various timescales and using multiple lines of evidence. The similarities in the boundary conditions between the mid-Pliocene and the present day, together with the globally elevated temperatures, make the mid-Pliocene an ideal paleo time period from which to derive inferences of climate sensitivity and assess the impacts of various timescale-dependent feedback processes. We assess a hierarchy of climate sensitivities of increasing complexity in order to explore the response of the climate over a very large range of timescales. The picture that emerges is as follows: on the short timescale, owing to the influence of fast feedback processes, the climate sensitivity is 3.25 °C per doubling of CO2; sensitivity increases to 4.16 °C per doubling of CO2 on an intermediate timescale as the ice–albedo feedback becomes active, and then sensitivity further increases to 7.0 °C per doubling of CO2 on long timescales due to the feedback from the glacial isostatic adjustment of the Earth's surface in response to the melting of the polar ice sheets. Finally, once the slow feedbacks have stabilized, the sensitivity of the system drops to 3.35 °C per doubling of CO2. Our inference of the intermediate-timescale climate sensitivity suggests that the projected warming by 2300 CE, inferred using Earth system models of intermediate complexity on the basis of an extension to the RCP4.5 emission scenario in which atmospheric pCO2 stabilizes at roughly twice the PI level in year 2150 CE, could be underestimated by  ∼ 1 °C due to the absence of ice-sheet-based feedbacks in those models.

The Southeast Asian Monsoon (SEAM) is strongly affected by the complex topography and land–sea interface over Southeast Asia (SEA), which combine to make simulation of the SEAM technically challenging. To adequately assess the regional climate change signal, we have employed the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model to dynamically downscale a global climate change projection produced with the Community Earth System Model using different physics configurations in WRF, constituting a 5-member physics mini-ensemble. All ensemble members consistently project an increase in average SEAM rainfall and an increase in the frequency of extreme events. A regional ocean model based upon the Coastal and Regional Ocean Community model system was then incorporated into the dynamical downscaling pipeline and this has also contributed to significantly further improving the simulations of both sea surface temperature and SEAM rainfall. Since the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is widely considered to act as an elevated heat source which contributes to driving the Asian monsoon system, a coupled dynamically downscaled simulation with flattened plateau has also been performed so as to investigate the role of TP in the SEAM at a higher spatial resolution than has previously been investigated. Significant decrease of precipitation and winds over SEA, as well as a later monsoon onset by 1 month, are documented for the no TP experiment. Extreme precipitation is less affected than average precipitation. Such changes are more important for the northern part of the domain and are significantly amplified in the dynamically downscaled WRF simulations when compared with the global simulations that employ significantly coarser resolution.

An analysis of changes in precipitation extremes in western Canada is presented, based upon an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate projections. The ensemble is composed of four independent, identically configured Community Earth System Model (CESM) integrations that were dynamically downscaled to 10-km resolution, using the WRF Model in two different configurations. Only the representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario is considered. Changes in extremes are found to generally follow changes in the (seasonal) mean, but changes in mean and extreme precipitation differ strongly between seasons and regions (where extremes are defined as the seasonal maximum of daily precipitation). At the end of the twenty-first century, the highest projected increase in precipitation extremes is approximately 30% in winter away from the coast and in fall at the coast. Changes in winter are consistent between models; however, changes in summer are not: CESM is characterized by a decrease in summer precipitation (and extremes), while one WRF configuration shows a significant increase and another no statistically significant change. Nevertheless, the fraction of convective precipitation (extremes) in summer increases by 20%–30% in all models. There is also evidence that the climate change signal in summer is sensitive to the choice of the convection scheme. A comparison of CESM and WRF shows that higher resolution clearly improves the representation of winter precipitation (extremes), while summer precipitation does not appear to be sensitive to resolution (convection is parameterized in both models). To increase the statistical power of the extreme value analysis that has been performed, a novel method for combining data from climatologically similar stations was employed.