Plot of the month for December 2016 is from Benoît Vannière, who evaluates hydrological cycle processes in models and their sensitivity to model horizontal resolution.![]()
This figure shows the ratio of land to global precipitation as a function of model resolution (at 50°N). Filled circles show atmosphere-only experiments and open circles show coupled experiments.
- It is interesting to note that two different behaviours arise depending on model formulation: for finite differences/volumes models (HadGEM3, CAM5-1) the land to global precipitation ratio increases with resolution, whereas it decreases in spectral models (EC-Earth3, EC-Earth3.1, MRI3.2).
- Coupling does not modify this behaviour.
- The purple circles stand for two experiments testing the sensitivity to the resolution of orography: the control (top) uses HadGEM3_GA6 on high-resolution N480 grid, the perturbed experiment (bottom) uses the same atmospheric resolution but with low-resolution N96 orography (see the About HRCM page for an illustration).