The second version of the coupled Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM2) is presented and evaluated. The temperature and precipitation patterns has improved compared to NorESM1. The model reaches present-day warming levels to within 0.2 °C of observed temperature but with a delayed warming during the late 20th century. Under the four scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5), the warming in the period of 2090–2099 compared to 1850–1879 reaches 1.3, 2.2, 3.1, and 3.9 K.

We show that ensuring global conservation of the angular (rotational) momentum (AM) of the atmosphere along the Earth's axis of rotation, which is a property of the governing equations, has important and beneficial consequences for the quality of the numerical simulation of the general circulation of the atmosphere. We discuss the causes of non-conservation in the FV dynamical core of the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), propose remedies, and show their impact in correcting systematic biases.

Here we report the PlioMIP2 simulations by two versions of the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) with updated boundary conditions derived from Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping version 4. The two NorESM versions both produce warmer and wetter Pliocene climate with deeper and stronger Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Compared to PlioMIP1, PlioMIP2 simulates lower Pliocene warming with NorESM-L, likely due to the closure of seaways at northern high latitudes.

Modern climate models are affected by systematic biases that harm their ability to produce reliable seasonal forecasts and climate projections. In this study, we investigate causes of biases in wind patterns over the tropical Atlantic during northern spring in three related models. We find that the wind biases are associated with an increase in excess rainfall and convergence in the tropical western Atlantic at the start of April, leading to the redirection of trade winds away from the Equator.

The Tibetan Plateau region exerts a considerable influence on regional climate, yet the snowpack over that region is poorly represented in both climate and forecast models due a large precipitation and snowfall bias. We evaluate the snowpack in state-of-the-art atmospheric reanalyses against in situ observations and satellite remote sensing products. Improved snow initialisation through better use of snow observations in reanalyses may improve medium-range to seasonal weather forecasts.

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a new variant of the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM). It is a computationally efficient model that is designed for experiments such as paleoclimate, carbon cycle, and large ensemble simulations. The model, with various recent code updates, shows improved climate performance compared to the CMIP5 version of NorESM, while the model resolution remains similar.

This paper aims to show how the tropical circulation responds to changes of the vertical stratification of the imposed temperature that drives the model. These changes mimic the presence of water vapor cycles. Thus, for simplicity's sake we impose a periodic change of this stratification with variable periods of 10–90 days. The model responds with quasi-periodic oscillations having two or more dominant frequencies. After a long forcing time period, chaotic behavior starts to appear cyclically.

We investigate long-term climate reanalyses datasets to infer their quality in reproducing snow depth values compared to in situ measured data from meteorological stations that go back to 1900. We found that the long-term reanalyses do a good job in reproducing snow depths but have some questionable snow states early in the 20th century. Thus, with care, climate reanalyses can be a valuable tool to investigate spatial snow evolution in global warming and climate change studies.

We assess and quantify the ozone loss driven by NO_x, triggered by stratospheric warmings and the halogens-induced ozone loss, using data assimilation results over a decade. To illustrate the difference between halogen-induced loss and NO_x-induced loss, we compared a relatively cold and stable winter (2010/2011) with a composite calculation of four winters (2003/2004, 2005/2006, 2008/2009 and 2012/2013) which were all affected by a major mid-winter sudden stratospheric warming event.

Mesospheric ozone enhancements during sudden stratospheric warmings in the northern hemisphere have been reported in the literature. In the southern hemisphere, only one warming event has occurred, and this paper is the first to explain the mesospheric ozone enhancement during this event in 2002, using both a whole atmosphere chemistry climate model and satellite observations from GOMOS.

At the Equator, where the heating is larger than that at other latitudes, air rises and diverges poleward in the upper troposphere, descending more or less at 30° latitude; this circulation is the Hadley cell. We studied the impact of different meridional and vertical temperature distributions on a few features of the Hadley cell. Some parameters show a regular dependence on these distributions; others remain rather stable with distributions, but when they change, they do it in an abrupt way.