The Impact of Sea Surface Temperature Biases on North American Precipitation in a High-Resolution Climate Model

Abstract

Positive precipitation biases over western North America have remained a pervasive problem in the current generation of coupled global climate models. These biases are substantially reduced, however, in a version of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Forecast-Oriented Low Ocean Resolution (FLOR) coupled climate model with systematic sea surface temperature (SST) biases artificially corrected through flux adjustment. This study examines how the SST biases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans contribute to the North American precipitation biases. Experiments with the FLOR model in which SST biases are removed in the Atlantic and Pacific are carried out to determine the contribution of SST errors in each basin to precipitation statistics over North America. Tropical and North Pacific SST biases have a strong impact on northern North American precipitation, while tropical Atlantic SST biases have a dominant impact on precipitation biases in southern North America, including the western United States. Most notably, negative SST biases in the tropical Atlantic in boreal winter induce an anomalously strong Aleutian low and a southward bias in the North Pacific storm track. In boreal summer, the negative SST biases induce a strengthened North Atlantic subtropical high and Great Plains low-level jet. Each of these impacts contributes to positive annual mean precipitation biases over western North America. Both North Pacific and North Atlantic SST biases induce SST biases in remote basins through dynamical pathways, so a complete attribution of the effects of SST biases on precipitation must account for both the local and remote impacts.