Higher resolution alone will not fix climate models' daytime precipitation cycle problems
Monday, April 13, 2015 - 07:30
in Earth & Climate
Using increased computing power, climate modelers divide Earth's atmosphere into smaller areas so that global models can represent more details in the climate. But how do these large models behave with this higher resolution? Using a regional atmospheric model as a proxy for upcoming high-resolution global climate models, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that global models carry many biases into the higher resolution regional output despite its finer detail. The research identified certain tradeoffs that highlight modeling challenges when moving from coarse to high-resolution simulations.