Near-surface meteorology during the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS): evaluation of reanalyses and global climate models

Atmospheric measurements from the Arctic Sum- mer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS) are used to evaluate the performance of three atmospheric reanalyses (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF)- Interim reanalysis, National Center for Environmental Pre- diction (NCEP)-National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reanalysis, and NCEP-DOE (Department of En- ergy) reanalysis) and two global climate models (CAM5 (Community Atmosphere Model 5) and NASA GISS (God- dard Institute for Space Studies) ModelE2) in simulation of the high Arctic environment. Quantities analyzed include near surface meteorological variables such as temperature, pressure, humidity and winds, surface-based estimates of cloud and precipitation properties, the surface energy bud- get, and lower atmospheric temperature structure. In general, the models perform well in simulating large-scale dynamical quantities such as pressure and winds. Near-surface temper- ature and lower atmospheric stability, along with surface en- ergy budget terms, are not as well represented due largely to errors in simulation of cloud occurrence, phase and altitude. Additionally, a development version of CAM5, which fea- tures improved handling of cloud macro physics, has demon- strated to improve simulation of cloud properties and liquid water amount. The ASCOS period additionally provides an excellent example of the benefits gained by evaluating indi- vidual budget terms, rather than simply evaluating the net end product, with large compensating errors between individual surface energy budget terms that result in the best net energy budget.

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