Atmosphere‐ocean heat fluxes and stresses in general circulation models

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Abstract
The coupling of atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) to oceanic general circulation models (OGCMs) requires that each behaves appropriately in the uncoupled mode. The lower boundary conditions for uncoupled AGCMs are particularly simple over the oceans and consist of the specified climatological sea surface temperatures and sea‐ice extents. AGCMs develop fluxes of energy, momentum and moisture in response to these specified sea surface temperatures while they interact with their internal dynamics and parametrized physics. The atmosphere‐ocean fluxes of energy and momentum developed in a collection of twelve AGCMs are compared with the climatological estimates of these terms. For the snapshot provided by this particular collection of models, the fluxes developed in the AGCMs are qualitatively similar to the climatological estimates, but there may be quantitative differences of considerable magnitude for some models as well as scatter among model values. Both the observation‐based estimates and the model‐generated values of these basic climatological quantities deserve attention, and efforts in this area are briefly noted.

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