Transient Climate Change in the Hadley Centre Models: The Role of Physical Processes

Abstract

A comparison of the response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations of two versions of the Met Office's (Hadley Centre) coupled atmosphere–ocean model reveals differences that result in large local variations in the modeled impact of climate change. With the aim of understanding the important processes and feedbacks associated with climate change, and ultimately reducing uncertainty in predictions, a series of sensitivity experiments were performed using a coupled atmosphere–mixed layer ocean model. The primary differences in the atmospheric response of the coupled models studied are found to be due to changes made to the physical representation of the atmosphere rather than to the ocean. In particular, many of the different patterns of response can be explained through changes made to the boundary layer scheme combining in a nonlinear way with changes to the cloud scheme to alter the tropical temperature and precipitation response in the model. A new land surface exchange scheme largely accounts for the different Northern Hemisphere continental surface temperature response.