Monsoon Mission Coupled Forecast System version 2.0: model description and Indian monsoon simulations

We present the Monsoon Mission Coupled Forecast System version 2.0 (MMCFSv2) model, which substantially upgrades the present operational MMCFSv1 (version 1) at the India Meteorology Department. The latest 25 years (1998–2022) of retrospective seasonal coupled hindcast simulations of the Indian summer monsoon with April initial conditions from Coupled Forecast System Reanalysis are discussed. MMCFSv2 simulates the tropical wind, rainfall, and temperature structure reasonably well. MMCFSv2 captures surface winds well and reduces precipitation biases over land, except over India and North America. The dry bias over these regions remained like in MMCFSv1. MMCFSv2 captures significant features of the Indian monsoon, including the intensity and location of the maximum precipitation centers and the large-scale monsoon circulation. MMCFSv2 improves the phase skill (anomaly correlation coefficient) of the interannual variation of Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) by 17 % and enhances the amplitude skill (normalized root mean square error) by 20 %. MMCFSv2 shows improved teleconnections of ISMR with the equatorial Indian and Pacific oceans. This 25-year hindcast dataset will serve as the baseline for future sensitivity studies of MMCFSv2.