Publication Date:
2017-11-20
Description:
Paleo-proxy observations have been recently used to constrain the climate models through data assimilation (DA). However, both DA and climate models are computationally very expensive. Moreover, in paleo-DA, the assimilation period is usually too long for a dynamical model to follow the previous analysis state and the chaotic behavior of the model becomes dominant. The majority of the recent paleoclimate studies using DA have performed low or intermediate resolution global simulations along with an off-line DA approach. In an off-line DA, the re-initialisation cycle is completely removed after the assimilation step. In this paper, we design a computationally affordable DA to assimilate yearly pseudo and real observations into an ensemble of COSMO-CLM high resolution regional climate model (RCM) simulations over Europe, where the ensemble members slightly differ in boundary and initial conditions. Within a perfect model experiment, the performance of the applied DA scheme is evaluated with respect to its sensitivity to the noise levels of pseudo-observations. It was observed that the injected bias in the pseudo-observations does linearly impact the DA skill. Such experiments can serve as a tool for selection of proxy records, which can potentially reduce the background error when they are assimilated in the model. Additionally, the sensibility of the COSMO-CLM to the boundary conditions is addressed. The geographical regions, where the model exhibits high internal variability are identified. Two sets of experiments are conducted by averaging the observations over summer and winter. The dependency of the DA skill to different seasons is investigated. Furthermore, the effect of the spurious correlations within the observation space is studied and the optimal correlation length, within which the observations are assumed to be correlated, is detected. Finally, the real yearly-averaged observations are assimilated into the RCM and the performance is evaluated against a gridded observation dataset. We conclude that the DA approach is a promising tool for creating high resolution yearly analysis quantities. The affordable DA method can be applied to efficiently improve the climate field reconstruction efforts by combining high resolution paleo-climate simulations and the available proxy observations.
Print ISSN:
1814-9340
Electronic ISSN:
1814-9359
Topics:
Geosciences
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