Understanding the development of systematic errors in the Asian summer monsoon

Abstract

Despite the importance of monsoon rainfall to over half of the world's population, many climate models of the current generation struggle to capture some of the major features of the various monsoon systems. Studies of the development of errors in several tropical regions have shown that they start to develop very quickly, within the first few days of a model simulation, and can then persist to climate timescales. Understanding the sources of such errors requires the combination of various modelling techniques and sensitivity experiments of varying complexity. Here, we demonstrate how such analysis can shed light on the way in which monsoon errors develop, their local and remote drivers and feedbacks. We make use of the seamless modelling approach adopted by the Met Office, whereby different applications of the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) use essentially the same model configuration (dynamical core and physical parameterisations) across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Using the Asian summer monsoon (ASM) as an example, we show that error patterns in circulation and rainfall over the ASM region in the MetUM are similar between multidecadal climate simulations and seasonal hindcasts initialised in spring. Analysis of the development of these errors on both short-range and seasonal timescales following model initialisation suggests that both the Maritime Continent and the oceans around the Philippines play a role in the development of East Asian summer monsoon errors, with the Indian summer monsoon region providing an additional contribution, while the errors over the Indian summer monsoon region itself appear to arise locally. Regional modelling with various lateral boundary locations helps to separate local and remote contributions to the errors, while regional relaxation experiments shed light on the influence of errors developing within particular areas on the region as a whole.