Simulation of tropical climate with a linear primitive equation model

Abstract

The tropical climate simulated with a new global atmosphere model is presented. In this paper the authors examine the sensitivity of the model's climate to specific formulations of convection, boundary-layer physics, and radiation. The model uses the Betts-Miller convection scheme and a parameterization of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) that combines similarity theory for computation of surface fluxes with a simple scheme for diagnosing PBL depth. Radiative cooling is specified and land surface processes are bypassed by relaxing modeled low-level values to observed quantities. Orography is ignored. The model contains six vertical layers and has a horizontal resolution of about 3° × 5.625°. The authors compare the climate simulated with two different version of the Betts-Miller convection scheme. -from Authors