Slab Ocean Component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM): Development, Evaluation, and Application to Understanding Earth System Sensitivity

This work describes the implementation and evaluation of the Slab Ocean Model component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2 (E3SMv2-SOM) and its application to understanding the climate sensitivity to ocean heat transports (OHTs) and CO₂ forcing. E3SMv2-SOM reproduces the baseline climate and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of the fully coupled E3SMv2 experiments reasonably well, with a pattern correlation close to 1 and a global mean bias of less than 1% of the fully coupled surface temperature and precipitation. Sea ice extent and volume are also well reproduced in the SOM. Consistent with general model behavior, the ECS estimated from the SOM (4.5 K) exceeds the effective climate sensitivity obtained from extrapolation to equilibrium in the fully coupled model (4.0 K). The E3SMv2 baseline climate also shows a large sensitivity to OHT strengths, with a global surface temperature difference of about 4.0°C between high-/low-OHT experiments with prescribed forcings derived from fully coupled experiments with realistic/weak ocean circulation strengths. Similar to their forcing pattern, the surface temperature response occurs mainly over the subpolar regions in both hemispheres. However, the Southern Ocean shows more surface temperature sensitivity to high/low-OHT forcing due to a positive/negative shortwave cloud radiative effect caused by decreases/increases in mid-latitude marine low-level clouds. This large temperature sensitivity also causes an overcompensation between the prescribed OHTs and atmosphere heat transports. The SOM's ECS estimate is also sensitive to the prescribed OHT and the associated baseline climate it is initialized from; the high-OHT ECS is 0.5 K lower than the low-OHT ECS.