Physics–dynamics coupling in weather, climate, and Earth system models: Challenges and recent progress

Hence, any improvement in one of the components is unlikely to improve the performance of the overall system. The challenges associated with combining the components to create a coherent model are here termed physics-dynamics coupling. The issue goes beyond the coupling between the parameterizations and the resolved fluid dynamics.

This paper highlights recent progress and some of the current challenges. It focuses on three objectives: to illustrate the phenomenology of the coupling problem with references to examples in the literature, to show how the problem can be analyzed, and to create awareness of the issue across the disciplines and specializations. The topics addressed are different ways of advancing full models in time, approaches to understanding the role of the coupling and evaluation of approaches, coupling ocean and atmosphere models, thermodynamic compatibility between model components, and emerging issues such as those that arise as model resolutions increase and/or models use variable resolutions.