Replication data for "Outsize Influence of Central American Orography on Global Climate"

This repository contains output from the two different coupled atmosphere-ocean Global Climate Models (GCMs) used in the related study (Baldwin et al 2021, "Outsize Influence of Central American Orography on Global Climate" AGU Advances): GFDL CM2.5-FLOR (hereafter FLOR), and NCAR CCSM4 (hereafter CCSM4). Also included are earth observations used to compare to the GCM output. The purpose of the GCM experiments is to test the influence of orographic height on climate, with a particular focus on Central America. The purpose of the observations is to calculate GCM biases. Details for the methods used to create this data can be found in the related publication linked below. The data is in netCDF format, with dimensions latitude, longitude, and (in most cases) time. Due to storage limitations, the diagnostics included here are only those that support the analyses included in the related paper. For other diagnostics from these experiments please contact the data authors.

Experiments/ File categories:

• flor.ctrl and ccsm4.ctrl = topography averaged onto model grid (standard method)
• flor.hitopo = topography interpolated to model grid by taking gricell max
• flor.cam = hitopo method only over Central America
• ccsm4.ideal_cam = topography elevated to particular height over only Central America
• obs = observational datasets from a variety of sources (see paper for details)

Diagnostics (Note: these labels correspond to the file names; the variables within the files follow the specific GCM-- eg CCSM4 or FLOR--conventions.):

• ucomp = near-surface zonal winds
• vcomp = near-surface meridional winds
• precip = precipitation
• taux = zonal surface wind stress
• tauy = meridional surface wind stress
• sst = surface temperature (used only for sea-surface temperature in the accompanying code and paper)
• u = zonal ocean currents at 15 m depth
• zsurf = surface height
• land_mask = land-sea mask
• land = includes land-sea mask and surface height