figures.brian
Below are a set of plots of zonal mean quantities for three experiments. In each plot the black line is the CAM run in the default configuration, which is called 'control.' The dark blue line is the default aqua planet configuration. In that configuration there is no seasonal variation, no land, and SST is an analytic expression with peak SST on the equator. The light blue line is my own version of the aqua planet. This version also lacks land and seasons, but is prescribed the zonal mean SST from the CAM climatology. Both aqua planet experiments exclude sea-ice, and they each include seasonal effects due to prescribed ozone concentration.

Some plots are included for variables with multiple levels. For now, only a given level (850 hPa) is included here.

The plots from the CAM climatology do NOT mask land points.

 Some additional plots show comparisons of the vertical structure of the atmosphere. In each of these plots, the control CAM climatology is the leftmost panel, then the default aqua planet, and the homemade aqua planet with the annual-mean zonally averaged SST distribution is the rightmost panel. The axes are pressure and latitude, showing pole-to-pole. Each panel shares a common color scale shown by the color bar, and the contouring intervals have been set to span from the minimum value of the three panels to the maximum through 20 levels of shading (annotated in a box at the lower right of each panel).

These plots can be compared with the 850 hPa plots described to the left.

Again, no land masking was applied to the control experiment.
Variable
U [png] [eps]
V [png] [eps]
T [png] [eps]
Sfc Pres [png] [eps]
Cloud Fraction [png] [eps]
High Cloud [png] [eps]
Middle Cloud [png] [eps]
Low Cloud [png] [eps]
Total Vertically Integrated Cloud [png] [eps]
Latent Heat Flux [png] [eps]
Sensible Heat Flux [png] [eps]
LW Cloud Forcing [png] [eps]
SW Cloud Forcing [png] [eps]
PBL height [png] [eps]
Convective Precip Rate [png] [eps]
Large-scale Precip Rate [png] [eps]
Shallow Convection Precip Rate [png] [eps]
Relative Humidity [png] [eps]
Precipitable Water [png] [eps]
Omega [png] [eps]
Variable
U [png] [eps]
V [png] [eps]
T [png] [eps]
Q (specific humidity) [png] [eps]
Omega (pressure velocity) [png] [eps]
Cloud (fraction) [png] [eps]
In trying to decide how much area to include in various analyses, I began to wonder if there is a good way to define the tropics. Following up on a comment made in Wyant et al. (2005?), I made some plots of vertical velocity at 500 hPa, averaged over an increasingly wide latitude belt centered on the equator. The idea is that the tropical circulation, on average, can be considered closed (only at the very roughest level of approximation, of course). So we might be able to say that the tropics are the low-latitude belt with approximately vanishing mean vertical motion (assuming vertical motion is a good proxy for circulation). The x-axis labels are a little funny because they are just rounded to the nearest latitude of the grid.

CAM w/SOM [png][eps]
Aqua Planet w/analytic SST [png][eps]
Aqua Planet w/analytic SST +2K [png][eps]
Aqua Planet w/analytic SST -2K [png][eps]
Aqua Planet w/obs SST & symmetric O3 [png][eps]

It looks like the analytic SST makes a substantially narrower tropical belt, while using observed SST has little effect on the size of the Tropics.
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