Evaluation of CMIP5 coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models over the southeast asian winter monsoon in the 20th century

Abstract

The objective of this present study is to evaluate the performance of ten coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) based on their capability to simulate the present-day climatology winter monsoon (December-January-February) sea surface temperature (SST) from 1961 to 2000 over the Southeast Asia (SEA) region. The domain of interest covers 11°S-19°N and 92°-132°E. All models simulated the broad features of winter monsoon SST spatial pattern with small spread of bias magnitudes. All models are able to capture the shape of SST annual cycle for both the northern and southern SEA, as the relative peaks and the troughs of the annual cycle of SST were well represented. All models simulated the observed seasonal variation of the surface circulation in the SEA region. The simulated salinity also agrees with the observation except IPSL, CanESM2 and CNRM that gave lower salinity over the South China Sea (SCS). Overall, three AOGCMs, namely CNRM-CM5, MPI-ESM-LR and NorESM1-M simulated the most realistic present-day SST, salinity and surface circulation.