RT journal article
T1 Assessment of the Canary current upwelling system in a regionally coupled climate model
A1 Vázquez Medina, Rubén
A1 Parras Berrocal, Iván Manuel
A1 Cabos, William
A1 Sein, Dmitry V.
A1 Mañanes Salinas, Rafael
A1 Izquierdo González, Alfredo
A2 Física Aplicada
K1 Canary current
K1 Coastal upwelling
K1 REMO-OASIS-MPIOM
K1 Climate assessment
K1 Regional climate modelling
AB The Canary current upwelling is one of the major eastern boundary coastal upwelling systems in the world, bearing a high productive ecosystem and commercially important fisheries. The Canary current upwelling system (CCUS) has a large latitudinal extension, usually divided into upwelling zones with different characteristics. Eddies, filaments and other mesoscale processes are known to have an impact in the upwelling productivity, thus for a proper representation of the CCUS and high horizontal resolution are required. Here we assess the CCUS present climate in the atmosphere-ocean regionally coupled model. The regional coupled model presents a global oceanic component with increased horizontal resolution along the northwestern African coast, and its performance over the CCUS is assessed against relevant reanalysis data sets and compared with an ensemble of global climate models (GCMs) and an ensemble of atmosphere-only regional climate models (RCMs) in order to assess the role of the horizontal resolution. The coupled system reproduces the larger scale pattern of the CCUS and its latitudinal and seasonal variability over the coastal band, improving the GCMs outputs. Moreover, it shows a performance comparable to the ensemble of RCMs in representing the coastal wind stress and near-surface air temperature fields, showing the impact of the higher resolution and coupling for CCUS climate modelling. The model is able of properly reproducing mesoscale structures, being able to simulate the upwelling filaments events off Cape Ghir, which are not well represented in most of GCMs. Our results stress the ability of the regionally coupled model to reproduce the larger scale as well as mesoscale processes over the CCUS, opening the possibility to evaluate the climate change signal there with increased confidence.
PB SPRINGER
SN 0930-7575
YR 2021
FD 2021-07
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/25649
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/25649
LA eng
NO Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Ruben Vazquez was supported through a doctoral grant at the University of Ferrara and University of Cadiz. Dmitry Sein was supported in the framework of the state assignment of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia (No. 0128-2021-0014). This work used resources of the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) granted by its Scientific Steering Committee (WLA) under project ID ba0987.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 11-nov-2026