Data from: On critical dependence of atmospheric circulation response to regional SST biases on background SST

Understanding the impact of sea surface temperature (SST) biases on simulated atmospheric circulation is crucial for uncertainty quantification in climate projection. Here, we investigate the impact of regional SST biases on the model atmosphere and how this impact varies with the geographic location of the SST bias. We performed 106 idealized century-long sensitivity simulations with an intermediate complex atmospheric model. Based on these simulations, we assessed the effect of regional SST biases on the global atmospheric circulation using a novel dynamical approach, which enables us to quantify the changes in global spatio-temporal variability. The amplitude of the global atmospheric response to regional SST biases is found to depend strongly on the local background SST. SST biases in warmer tropical oceans have much stronger impacts than those in cooler extratropical oceans. In particular, given an SST bias of +1.5 K, there is a substantial response when the local background SST exceeds approximately 25°C.

Seven datasets produced by MATLAB.

"sst_biases.mat" contains 106 SST biases used in the model.

"local_mean_sst.mat" contains local mean background SST within each SST bias area.

"bias_precip_maps.mat" contains horizontal maps of total precipitation biases.

"local_precip_bias.mat" contains local mean precipitation bias within each SST bias area.

"bias_geopotential_height_250hPa_maps.mat" contains horizontal maps of geopotential height biases at 250 hPa

"bias_global_wave_energy.mat" contains changes in the globally integrated wave energy.                "bias_global_wave_interannual_variance.mat" contains changes in the globally integrated interannual variance.