Evaluation of the surface heat budget over the tropical Indian Ocean in two versions of FGOALS

Abstract

Changes of the net ocean surface heat flux (Qnet) into the tropical Indian Ocean (TIO) may be an indicator of the climate changes in the Asia and Indian–Pacific Ocean regions with the steadily warming trend in the TIO since the 1950s. Using two observational ocean surface flux products, this letter evaluates the historical simulations of Qnet over the TIO during 1984–2005 in two versions of FGOALS, from CMIP5. The results show that both models present a basin-wide underestimation of net surface heat flux, possibly resulting from the positive latent heat flux biases extending over almost the entire TIO basin. Both models share an Indian Ocean dipole-like bias in the net surface heat flux, consistent with precipitation, SST, and subsurface ocean temperature biases, which can be traced to errors in the South Asian summer monsoon. Area-averaged annual time series analyses of the surface heat budget imply that the FGOALS-s2 bias lies more in radiative imbalance, illustrating the need to improve cloud simulation; while the FGOALS-g2 bias presents ocean surface turbulence flux as the key process, requiring improvement in the simulation of oceanic processes. Neither FGOALS-g2 nor FGOALS-s2 can capture the decreasing tendency of Qnet well. All observed and simulated datasets imply surface latent heat flux as the primary contributing component, indicating the simulation biases of models may derive mainly from the biases in simulating latent heat flux. A small latent heat flux increase in models can be considered to be slowed by relaxed wind, increased stability, and surface relative humidity.