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Biases in southern hemisphere climate trends induced by coarsely specifying the temporal resolution of stratospheric ozone
Author(s) -
Neely R. R.,
Marsh D. R.,
Smith K. L.,
Davis S. M.,
Polvani L. M.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2014gl061627
Subject(s) - ozone , atmospheric sciences , southern hemisphere , climatology , ozone layer , northern hemisphere , environmental science , ozone depletion , troposphere , tropospheric ozone , coupled model intercomparison project , climate model , atmosphere (unit) , stratosphere , climate change , meteorology , geology , geography , oceanography
Global climate models that do not include interactive middle atmosphere chemistry, such as most of those contributing to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, typically specify stratospheric ozone using monthly mean, zonal mean values and linearly interpolate to the time resolution of the model. We show that this method leads to significant biases in the simulated climate of the southern hemisphere (SH) over the late twentieth century. Previous studies have attributed similar biases in simulated SH climate change to the effect of the spatial smoothing of the specified ozone, i.e., to using zonal mean concentrations. We here show that the bias in climate trends due to undersampling of the rapid temporal changes in ozone during the seasonal evolution of the Antarctic ozone hole is considerable and reaches all the way into the troposphere. Our results suggest that the bias can be substantially reduced by specifying daily ozone concentrations.