84th AMS Annual Meeting

Sunday, 11 January 2004
The Remote Influence Of Tropical Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures On The Tropical Pacific
Room 608/609
Erik Ulysses Noble, University of Colorado, Fort Collins, CO
Global climate models are tools that allow scientists to simulate the climate conditions of the past, present, and future to a reasonable degree with the exception that climate model projections contain biases. Biases exist such as differences between modeled temperatures and observed temperatures. This project is a sensitivity study that examines the biases contained in modeled Tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) by exploring the remote influence that the Tropical Atlantic may have upon the Tropical Pacific basin. We simulate several different scenarios on the time scale of a year that were induced with observed Tropical Atlantic SSTs by using a fully coupled-climate model. These scenarios include a Pacific warm event, cold event, and neutral event. The results indicate that there is a strong tropical Pacific SST impact. Comments to the robustness of the tropical Pacific SST impact with regards to the different scenarios compared to control experiments are provided with this coupled-climate model sensitivity study.

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