PAOC Spotlights

Prompted by earlier work using a coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice configuration of MITgcm (Rose and Marshall, 2009), David Ferreira, John Marshall and Brian Rose have been probing the model for multiple equilibria. Although low-order energy balance models of the climate are known to exhibit intransitivity, i.e. more than one climate state for a given set of governing equations, the teams results are the first to demonstrate that this is a property of a complex coupled model with an energetically-consistent set of equations representing the 3d dynamics of the ocean and atmosphere (i.e., there is importantly no flux correction). Their coupled model notably includes atmospheric synoptic systems, large-scale circulation of the ocean, a fully active hydrological cycle, sea-ice and a seasonal cycle.

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