How Much the Warming in Russia Agrees with the Output of Coupled Atmosphere–Ocean General Circulation Models?

V. P. Meleshko, V. M. Mirvis, and V. A. Govorkova

Climate variability parameters and air temperature trends in Russia, derived from observational data, are compared with those derived from climate modeling in the second half of the 20th–early 21st century, using the atmosphere–ocean general circulation model ensemble. The computation results from these models were used in the preparation of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is demonstrated that the ensemble averaging allowed us to efficiently filter the internal climate variability and get relatively stable estimates of trends. As a whole, for Russia, these estimates are in good agreement with the observational data, both for a year on average, and in individual seasons. The comparison of model and observed air temperature trends on a regional scale turns out to be irrelevant in a number of cases because of a high inadequacy of trend estimates derived from the observational data.

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