A New Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Boundary Dataset for the Community Atmosphere Model

• Published in: Journal of climate Vol. 21; no. 19; pp. 5145 - 5153
• Main Authors: Hurrell, James W., Hack, James J., Shea, Dennis, Caron, Julie M., Rosinski, James
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, MA American Meteorological Society 01-10-2008
• Subjects: Advantages; Analysis; Atmosphere; Atmospheric models; Atmospherics; Climate change; Climate models; Climatology; Datasets; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology; Experiments; External geophysics; General circulation models; Geophysics. Techniques, methods, instrumentation and models; Global climate models; Interpolation; Marine; Meteorology; Monthly; NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE; Ocean surface; Oceans; Other topics in atmospheric geophysics; Research methodology; Satellites; Sea ice; Sea ice concentrations; Sea ice temperatures; Sea surface; Sea surface temperature; Seas; Surface temperature; Weather forecasting; Climatology; Atmosphere model; General circulation models; Merging; meteorology; data processing; Sea surface temperature; Ice cover; sea ice; Observation data; Reanalysis; Forcing; boundary conditions
• ISSN: 0894-8755; 1520-0442
• DOI: 10.1175/2008jcli2292.1

A new surface boundary forcing dataset for uncoupled simulations with the Community Atmosphere Model is described. It is a merged product based on the monthly mean Hadley Centre sea ice and SST dataset version 1 (HadISST1) and version 2 of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weekly optimum interpolation (OI) SST analysis. These two source datasets were also used to supply ocean surface information to the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re-Analysis (ERA-40). The merged product provides monthly mean sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration data from 1870 to the present: it is updated monthly, and it is freely available for community use. The merging procedure was designed to take full advantage of the higher-resolution SST information inherent in the NOAA OI.v2 analysis.