The North Atlantic Oscillation signal in a regional climate simulation for the European region

Roxana Bojariu; Filippo Giorgi

doi:10.3402/tellusa.v57i4.14709

The North Atlantic Oscillation signal in a regional climate simulation for the European region

Tellus

Volume 57 (2005): Issue 4

By: Roxana Bojariu and Filippo Giorgi

Open Access

|Jan 2005

Abstract

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a dominant pattern of large-scale variability in the Northern Hemisphere, with important regional effects on the winter climate of Europe. Nested regional climate models (RCMs) can be useful tools for studying the regional signal of the NAO. Therefore, it is important to assess whether they can reproduce the observed NAO signal over Europe when driven by lateral boundary conditions from global climate models. In this paper we investigate the NAO-related winter variability over Europe in a RCM simulation driven by large-scale fields from an atmospheric global model simulation forced with historic sea surface temperature and sea ice distribution for the period 1961–1990. We show that (1) the NAO-related winter variability signal over the European region shows substantial topographically induced fine-scale features, both for temperature and precipitation, and (2) the model is capable of reproducing many aspects of this fine-scale regional signal and, in particular, the topographically forced regional response of precipitation to NAO-type circulations. We conclude that nested regional climate models can be used to study the fine-scale regional signature of the NAO under different climatic conditions.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3402/tellusa.v57i4.14709 | Journal eISSN: 3035-9554

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Language: English

Page range: 641 - 653

Submitted on: Apr 7, 2004

Accepted on: Nov 29, 2004

Published on: Jan 1, 2005

Published by: Stockholm University Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

© 2005 Roxana Bojariu, Filippo Giorgi, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 57 (2005): Issue 4