Abstract
It is important to have confidence in seasonal climate predictions of precipitation, particularly related to drought, as implications can be far-reaching and costly—this is particularly true for Florida. Precipitation can vary on fine spatial resolutions, and high-resolution coupled models may be needed to correctly represent precipitation variability. We study south Florida and southeast United States drought in Community Climate System version 4 low resolution (1° atmosphere/ocean) and high-resolution (0.5°atmosphere/0.1°ocean) predictions for time means ranging from 3 to 36 months. The very high-resolution in the ocean is of interest here given the potential importance of Gulf Stream on south Florida rainfall. Skill of shorter time-mean South Florida predictions (i.e. 3- and 12-months) are not impacted by increased resolution, but skill of 36-month mean south Florida precipitation is somewhat increased in the high resolution predictions. Notably, over the broader southeast United States the high-resolution model has higher skill for the 36-month mean rainfall predictions, associated with an improved relationship with tropical Pacific and Gulf Stream SSTA. Why this improvement in the broader southeast United States does not extend to Florida is an open question, but does suggest that even further resolution refinements may be needed.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported through the Postdocs Applying Climate Expertise Fellowship Program sponsored by the NOAA Climate Program Office and administered by the UCAR Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS). The authors would like to thank the NMME program partners, Dughong Min, the University of Miami Center for Computational Science, and anonymous reviewers who greatly improved the quality of this manuscript. CCSM4 NMME prediction data can be accessed at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/NMME/. CCSM4 high resolution predictive runs are archived at the Center for Computational Science at the University of Miami and are available upon request. The free software NCAR Command Language was used to create the plots and analyze data. Funding was provided by University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (US) (Grant no. PACE Fellowship) and National Science Foundation (Grant no. OCE 1419569).
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Infanti, J.M., Kirtman, B.P. A comparison of CCSM4 high-resolution and low-resolution predictions for south Florida and southeast United States drought. Clim Dyn 52, 6877–6892 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4553-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4553-0