AGCM biases in evaporation regime: Impacts on soil moisture memory and land-atmosphere feedback

Abstract

Because precipitation and net radiation in an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) are typically biased relative to observations, the simulated evaporative regime of a region may be biased, with consequent negative effects on the AGCM's ability to translate an initialized soil moisture anomaly into an improved seasonal prediction. These potential problems are investigated through extensive offline analyses with the Mosaic land surface model (LSM). The LSM was first forced globally with a 15-yr observation-based dataset. The simulation was then repeated after imposing a representative set of GCM climate biases onto the forcings - the observational forcings were scaled so that their mean seasonal cycles matched those simulated by the NASA Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP-1; NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office) AGCM over the same period. The AGCM's climate biases do indeed lead to significant biases in evaporative regime in certain regions, with the expected impacts on soil moisture memory time scales. Furthermore, the offline simulations suggest that the biased forcing in the AGCM should contribute to overestimated feedback in certain parts of North America - parts already identified in previous studies as having excessive feedback. The present study thus supports the notion that the reduction of climate biases in the AGCM will lead to more appropriate translations of soil moisture initialization into seasonal prediction skill. © 2005 American Meteorological Society.