Impact of resolution and interactive SST on climate statistics in global storm-resolving simulations

Abstract:

Basic climate statistics, such as water and energy budgets, location and width of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), trimodal tropical cloud distribution, position of the polar jet, and land sea contrast, remain either biased in coarse-resolution general circulation models or are tuned. Here, we first examine the horizontal resolution dependency of such statistics in a set of global storm-resolving simulations integrated with the ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic (ICON) model, explicit convection, and grid spacings ranging from 80 km down to 2.5 km. The impact of resolution is quantified by comparing the resolution-induced differences to the spread obtained in an ensemble of eight distinct global storm-resolving models conducted in the framework of the DYAMOND intercomparison project.

Using this metric, we find that, at least by 5 km, the resolution-induced differences become smaller than the spread in 26 out of the 27 investigated statistics. Even for nine (18) of these statistics, a grid spacing of 80 (10) km does not lead to significant differences. Resolution down to 5 km matters especially for net shortwave radiation, which systematically increases with the resolution because of reductions in the low cloud amount over the subtropical oceans. In a second step, we also investigate the effect of an interactive SST on these statistics, by running months-long 5-km coupled ICON simulations.