Journal
CLIMATE DYNAMICS
Volume 56, Issue 1-2, Pages 155-187Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00382-020-05471-4
Keywords
Sea-level rise; Ocean heat uptake; Climate change; Climate modeling
Categories
Funding
- UK Natural Environment Research Council [NE/R000727/1]
- Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) program of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG) [SPP 1889]
- NCMAS
- NCI-STRESS2020 grants through the National Computing Infrastructure National Facility at the Australian National University
- Tasmanian Graduate Research Scholarship
- CSIRO-UTAS Quantitative Marine Science top-up
- CSIRO
- Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub of the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme
- Australian Research Council [FT130101532, DP160103130]
- UK's Natural Environment Research Council [NE/P019293/1]
- Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia (COSIMA)
- Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU) [JPMXD0717935457, JPMXD0717935561]
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan
- Marine Environmental Observation Prediction & Response (MEOPAR) network
- National Computational Infrastructure [ly62]
- NERC [NE/P019293/1, ncas10014, NE/R000727/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Australian Research Council [FT130101532] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Research shows that the differences in sea level changes between different AOGCMs are mainly caused by variations in ocean model formulation, rather than diversity in surface flux. Heat flux drives the global pattern of sea level change, while momentum and water flux changes cause localized features. North Atlantic heat uptake and transport adjustment are important factors affecting sea level changes.
Sea levels of different atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) respond to climate change forcing in different ways, representing a crucial uncertainty in climate change research. We isolate the role of the ocean dynamics in setting the spatial pattern of dynamic sea-level (zeta) change by forcing several AOGCMs with prescribed identical heat, momentum (wind) and freshwater flux perturbations. This method produces a zeta projection spread comparable in magnitude to the spread that results from greenhouse gas forcing, indicating that the differences in ocean model formulation are the cause, rather than diversity in surface flux change. The heat flux change drives most of the global pattern of zeta change, while the momentum and water flux changes cause locally confined features. North Atlantic heat uptake causes large temperature and salinity driven density changes, altering local ocean transport and zeta. The spread between AOGCMs here is caused largely by differences in their regional transport adjustment, which redistributes heat that was already in the ocean prior to perturbation. The geographic details of the zeta change in the North Atlantic are diverse across models, but the underlying dynamic change is similar. In contrast, the heat absorbed by the Southern Ocean does not strongly alter the vertically coherent circulation. The Arctic zeta change is dissimilar across models, owing to differences in passive heat uptake and circulation change. Only the Arctic is strongly affected by nonlinear interactions between the three air-sea flux changes, and these are model specific.
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