Sensitivity of internally-generated climate oscillations to ocean model formulation.

Abstract

The simulation of climate on Pleistocene time scales requires coupling subsystems with response time scales which vary over several orders of magnitude. Most models of the coupled atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere (AOC) system have treated the global ocean as a single isothermal reservoir, resulting in a relatively slow surface temperature response time scale. We use a series of 1-D box ocean models and a box-advection diffusion ocean model to demonstrate that the ocean temperature does not respond with a single time scale.-from Authors