Journal
JOURNAL OF CLIMATE
Volume 25, Issue 23, Pages 8238-8258Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00636.1
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Funding
- Department of Energy [DE-SC0001962, DE-AC02-980110886]
- Earth System Modeling Program via the FASTER Project
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Climate and Environmental Sciences Division
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL) Aerosols Group
- NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Earth System Research Library (ESRL) Physical Science Division (PSD)
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Long time series of Arctic atmospheric measurements are assembled into meteorological categories that can serve as test cases for climate model evaluation. The meteorological categories are established by applying an objective k-means clustering algorithm to 11 years of standard surface-meteorological observations collected from 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2010 at the North Slope of Alaska (NSA) site of the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM). Four meteorological categories emerge. These meteorological categories constitute the first classification by meteorological regime of a long time series of Arctic meteorological conditions. The synoptic-scale patterns associated with each category, which include well-known synoptic features such as the Aleutian low and Beaufort Sea high, are used to explain the conditions at the NSA site. Cloud properties, which are not used as inputs to the k-means clustering, are found to differ significantly between the regimes and are also well explained by the synoptic-scale influences in each regime. Since the data available at the ARM NSA site include a wealth of cloud observations, this classification is well suited for model observation comparison studies. Each category comprises an ensemble of test cases covering a representative range in variables describing atmospheric structure, moisture content, and cloud properties. This classification is offered as a complement to standard case-study evaluation of climate model parameterizations, in which models are compared against limited realizations of the Earth atmosphere system (e.g., from detailed aircraft measurements).
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