Reconciling and Improving Formulations for Thermodynamics and Conservation Principles in Earth System Models (ESMs)

Abstract

Earth System Models (ESMs) have numerous total energy budget errors. This article establishes the governing total energy equations for large-scale ESMs and assesses the energy budget errors in real-world simulations in a widely used climate model. To move towards a closed energy budget in ESMs, further research on total energy conserving discretizations (in the dynamical core), unified thermodynamics (through thermodynamic potentials/conserved variables) and missing processes is paramount. This research is especially important since some of the energy budget errors will not improve with higher spatial resolution and may even get worse.