Coupled model simulations of climate changes in the 20th century and beyond

Several scenario experiments of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4) are performed by version g1.0 of a Flexible coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Model (FGOALS) developed at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP/CAS), including the “Climate of the 20th century experiment”, “CO2 1% increase per year to doubling experiment” and two separate IPCC greenhouse gases emission scenarios A1B and B1 experiments. To distinguish between the different impacts of natural variations and human activities on the climate change, three-member ensemble runs are performed for each scenario experiment. The coupled model simulations show: (1) from 1900 to 2000, the global mean temperature increases about 0.5°C and the major increase occurs during the later half of the 20th century, which is in consistent with the observations that highlights the coupled model’s ability to reproduce the climate changes since the industrial revolution; (2) the global mean surface air temperature increases about 1.6°C in the CO2 doubling experiment and 1.5°C and 2.4°C in the A1B and B1 scenarios, respectively. The global warming is indicated by not only the changes of the surface temperature and precipitation but also the temperature increase in the deep ocean. The thermal expansion of the sea water would induce the rise of the global mean sea level. Both the control run and the 20th century climate change run are carried out again with version g1.1 of FGOALS, in which the cold biases in the high latitudes were removed. They are then compared with those from version g1.0 of FGOALS in order to distinguish the effect of the model biases on the simulation of global warming.