Sieker, Tim (2024) Evaluating the mean climate in eddy-parameterized and eddy-rich versions of the FOCI-OpenIFS coupled climate model. (Master thesis), Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany, 65 pp.

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Abstract

Understanding and addressing biases in climate models is essential for reliable climate projections. This thesis evaluates the mean climate in three configurations of the FOCI-OpenIFS coupled climate model varying in horizontal and vertical ocean resolution. By comparing 20 years of hindcast simulations against observational datasets and current literature, this study investigates persistent biases in the ocean and the atmosphere, identifying their drivers and potential remedies, with a particular focus on the North Atlantic, Southern Ocean, and tropical regions. The results demonstrate the improved performance of the high-resolution ocean model in resolving mesoscale ocean dynamics and its impact on global and regional climate biases. Despite these improvements, challenges remain in high-latitude regions and processes related to vertical mixing and atmospheric coupling. The low-resolution models exhibit most of the common biases found in other climate models and increasing only the vertical resolution in the ocean often fails to mitigate these biases. In fact, the simulation with low horizontal and high vertical resolution performs the worst across most analyzed metrics. This research underscores the importance of resolution in reducing uncertainties in climate models and provides insights for future model development.

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