Carton James A.

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James A.
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  • Article
    From salty to fresh—salinity processes in the Upper-ocean Regional Study-2 (SPURS-2) : diagnosing the physics of a rainfall-dominated salinity minimum
    (The Oceanography Society, 2015-03) Schmitt, Raymond W. ; Asher, William E. ; Bingham, Frederick ; Carton, James A. ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Farrar, J. Thomas ; Gordon, Arnold L. ; Hodges, Benjamin A. ; Jessup, Andrew T. ; Kessler, William S. ; Rainville, Luc ; Shcherbina, Andrey Y.
    One of the notable features of the global ocean is that the salinity of the North Atlantic is about 1 psu higher than that of the North Pacific. This contrast is thought to be due to one of the large asymmetries in the global water cycle: the transport of water vapor by the trade winds across Central America and the lack of any comparable transport into the Atlantic from the Sahara Desert. Net evaporation serves to maintain high Atlantic salinities, and net precipitation lowers those in the Pacific. Because the effects on upper-ocean physics are markedly different in the evaporating and precipitating regimes, the next phase of research in the Salinity Processes in the Upper-ocean Regional Study (SPURS) must address a high rainfall region. It seemed especially appropriate to focus on the eastern tropical Pacific that is freshened by the water vapor carried from the Atlantic. In a sense, the SPURS-2 Pacific region will be looking at the downstream fate of the freshwater carried out of the SPURS-1 North Atlantic region. Rainfall tends to lower surface density and thus inhibit vertical mixing, leading to quite different physical structure and dynamics in the upper ocean. Here, we discuss the motivations for the location of SPURS-2 and the scientific questions we hope to address.
  • Article
    The Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3)
    (American Meteorological Society, 2006-06-01) Collins, William D. ; Bitz, Cecilia M. ; Blackmon, Maurice L. ; Bonan, Gordon B. ; Bretherton, Christopher S. ; Carton, James A. ; Chang, Ping ; Doney, Scott C. ; Hack, James J. ; Henderson, Thomas B. ; Kiehl, Jeffrey T. ; Large, William G. ; McKenna, Daniel S. ; Santer, Benjamin D. ; Smith, Richard D.
    The Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3) has recently been developed and released to the climate community. CCSM3 is a coupled climate model with components representing the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land surface connected by a flux coupler. CCSM3 is designed to produce realistic simulations over a wide range of spatial resolutions, enabling inexpensive simulations lasting several millennia or detailed studies of continental-scale dynamics, variability, and climate change. This paper will show results from the configuration used for climate-change simulations with a T85 grid for the atmosphere and land and a grid with approximately 1° resolution for the ocean and sea ice. The new system incorporates several significant improvements in the physical parameterizations. The enhancements in the model physics are designed to reduce or eliminate several systematic biases in the mean climate produced by previous editions of CCSM. These include new treatments of cloud processes, aerosol radiative forcing, land–atmosphere fluxes, ocean mixed layer processes, and sea ice dynamics. There are significant improvements in the sea ice thickness, polar radiation budgets, tropical sea surface temperatures, and cloud radiative effects. CCSM3 can produce stable climate simulations of millennial duration without ad hoc adjustments to the fluxes exchanged among the component models. Nonetheless, there are still systematic biases in the ocean–atmosphere fluxes in coastal regions west of continents, the spectrum of ENSO variability, the spatial distribution of precipitation in the tropical oceans, and continental precipitation and surface air temperatures. Work is under way to extend CCSM to a more accurate and comprehensive model of the earth's climate system.