SEASONAL ZONAL ENERGY-BALANCE CLIMATE MODEL WITH AN INTERACTIVE LOWER LAYER

The mean annual energy balance climate model of Gal-Chen and Schneider (1976) is expanded to a more general model which includes an interactive lower layer. The 2-layer model is used to simulate the seasonal cycle through the use of seasonally varying insolation. The most important general conclusion from these experiments is that realistic values of seasonally effective thermal inertia (i.e. primarily the oceanic mixed layer depth) are needed for the realistic simulation of the seasonal cycle of temperature. Use of realistic seasonal thermal inertia implies that climate sensitivity experiments with seasonal models (including global circulation models) will require decades of model simulation time to approach a reasonable climatic equilibrium. -from Authors