The Interannual Variability of Climate in a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model

In this paper, the interannual variability simulated by the coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP CGCM) in 40 year integrations is analyzed, and compared with that by the corresponding IAP AGCM which uses the climatic sea surface temperature as the boundary condition in 25 year integrations.The mean climatic states of January and July simulated by IAP CGCM are in good agreement with that by IAP AGCM, i.e., no serious ‘climate drift’ occurs in the CGCM simulation. A comparison of the results from AGCM and CGCM indicates that the standard deviation of the monthly averaged sea level pressure simulated by IAP CGCM is much greater than that by IAP AGCM in tropical region. In addition, both Southern Oscillation (SO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) can be found in the CGCM simulation for January, but these two oscillations do not exist in the AGCM simulation.The interannual variability of climate may be classified into two types: one is the variation of the annual mean, another is the variation of the annual amplitude. The ocean-atmosphere interaction mainly increases the first type of variability. By means of the rotated EOF, the most important patterns corresponding to the two types of interannual variability are found to have different spatial and temporal characteristics.