Articles | Volume 10, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-977-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-977-2017
Development and technical paper
 | 
27 Feb 2017
Development and technical paper |  | 27 Feb 2017

On the numerical stability of surface–atmosphere coupling in weather and climate models

Anton Beljaars, Emanuel Dutra, Gianpaolo Balsamo, and Florian Lemarié

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Cited articles

Beljaars, A., Bechtold, P., Koehler, M., Morcrette, J.-J., Tompkins, A., Viterbo, P., and Wedi, N.: The numerics of physical parametrization, in: Proc. of ECMWF Seminar on Recent developments in numerical methods for atmosphere and ocean modelling, 113–134, ECMWF, Reading, UK, 2004.
Best, M., Beljaars, A., Polcher, J., and Viterbo, P.: A proposed structure for coupling tiled surfaces with the planetary boundary layer, J. Hydrometeor., 5, 1271–1278, 2004.
Brutsaert, W.: Evaporation into the atmosphere, Springer, 1982.
Carslaw, H. and Jaeger, J.: Conduction of heat in solids, Springer, 1959.
Dutra, E., Balsamo, G., Viterbo, P., Miranda, P., Beljaars, A., Schär, C., and Elder, K.: An improved snow scheme for the ECMWF land surface model: description and offline validation, J. Hydrometeor., 11, 899–916, 2010.
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Short summary
Coupling an atmospheric model with snow and sea ice modules presents numerical stability challenges in integrations with long time steps as commonly used for weather prediction and climate simulations. Explicit flux coupling is often applied for simplicity. In this paper a simple method is presented to stabilize the coupling without having to introduce fully implicit coupling. A formal stability analysis confirms that the method is unconditionally stable.
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