Most of the uncertainty in the climate sensitivity of contemporary general circulation models (GCMs) is believed to be connected with differences in the simulated radiative feedback from clouds. Traditional methods of evaluating clouds in GCMs compare time–mean geographical cloud fields or aspects of present-day cloud variability, with observational data. In both cases a hypothetical assumption...

Abstract This work investigates the characteristics of westward-propagating Rossby modes in idealized global general circulation models. Using a nonlinear smoothing algorithm to estimate background spectrum and an objective method extract spectral peaks, four leading meridional can be identified for each first three zonal wavenumbers, with frequencies close predictions from Hough obtained by li...

[1] Climate change impact assessment on water resources with downscaled General Circulation Model (GCM) simulation output is characterized by uncertainty due to incomplete knowledge about the underlying geophysical processes of global change (GCM uncertainties) and due to uncertain future scenarios (scenario uncertainties). Disagreement between different GCMs and scenarios in regional climate c...

The influence of ocean–atmosphere interaction on the wintertime Arctic oscillation (AO) is investigated using a hierarchy of experiments made with two general circulation models (GCMs), ranging from climatologically forced atmospheric to fully coupled ocean–atmosphere GCMs with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Both GCMs reproduce well the AO spatial pattern, defined by the leading hemi...

The principal tools used to model future climate change are General Circulation Models which are deterministic high resolution bottom-up models of the global atmosphere-ocean system that require large amounts of supercomputer time to generate results. But are these models a cost-effective way of predicting future climate change at the global level? In this paper we use modern econometric techni...

[1] Key climate feedback due to water vapor and clouds rest largely on how relative humidity R changes in a warmer climate, yet this has not been extensively analyzed in models. General circulation models (GCMs) from the CMIP3 archive and several higher‐ resolution atmospheric GCMs examined here generally predict a characteristic pattern of R trend with global temperature that has been reported...

The “Vertical structure and physical processes of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO)” project comprises three experiments, designed to evaluate comprehensively the heating, moistening, and momentum associated with tropical convection in general circulation models (GCMs). We consider here only those GCMs that performed all experiments. Some models display relatively higher or lower MJO fidelity...

Studies of the effect of climate change on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air quality using general circulation models (GCMs) show inconsistent results including in the sign of the effect. This reflects uncertainty in the GCM simulations of the regional meteorological variables affecting PM2.5. Here we use the CMIP3 archive of data from fifteen different IPCC AR4 GCMs to obtain improved statis...