The impact of initial condition uncertainty on numerical simulations of blocking

The impact of initial condition uncertainty (ICU) on the onset and maintenance of eastern North Pacific blocking is examined within the framework of a general circulation model (GCM) and the perfect model assumption. Comparisons are made with the contrasting zonal flow regime. Twenty-member ensembles of perturbed simulations are run out to 15 days for the zonal flow, and for blocking at lead times of 8, 4, 2, and 0 days. Blocking occurs in 95% of the 0-day lead simulations and declines monotonically to 65% for the 8-day lead simulations. The uncertainty in the exact time of onset among those simulations that form blocks also increases with lead time. The synoptic-scale features in both the blocking and zonal ensembles saturate, relative to climatological variance, and decorrelate (anomaly correlation coefficient