Representation of High-Impact Weather in a Novel High-Resolution Climate-Scale Simulation using the Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (MPAS-A)

We present simulations representative of the historical climate using the high-resolution (15-km) global Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (MPAS-A) version 7.0. MPAS-A is a collaborative atmospheric modeling platform with unique capabilities useful for weather and climate research. Our simulations include prescribed sea surface temperatures and sea ice that are updated daily using the 0.05° Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Ice Analysis (OSTIA) over the 30-year simulation period (i.e., 1 October 1989 – 30 September 2019). To examine how MPAS-A represents the global tropical cyclone (TC) climatology, we track simulated TCs using the objective TempestExtremes tracking algorithm and compare results to observed TC tracks in IBTrACs throughout major ocean basins. Initial results indicate that MPAS-A effectively captures essential TC characteristics such as seasonality, location, and intensity in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. To our knowledge, this represents one of the very few long-running, high-resolution, climate-scale MPAS-A simulations to date and our results demonstrate the utility of MPAS-A for investigating climate-scale phenomena at spatial resolutions generally unachievable by general circulation models (GCMs). Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of our model simulations for future studies examining high-impact weather phenomena, such as TCs, in a model-relative framework.