Earth’s atmosphere and oceans interact through mechanical, radiative, and chemical processes. The emergent coupled atmospheric and oceanic circulations control fundamental properties of Earth’s climate, across spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the coupled circulations mediate teleconnections between remote regions, link cloud microphysical processes with global dynamics, and allow for delayed influence of elements in Earth’s climate system through ocean memory. Fundamental understanding of the coupled large-scale circulation remains a key challenge, critical for our ability to explain past climate variations and to make reliable predictions of the climate response to present-day forcings. In particular, systematic dynamic and thermodynamic biases persist through generations of coupled climate models, indicating gaps in our understanding of processes related to the coupled large-scale circulation. Among others, these include tropical precipitation biases (the “double ITCZ bias”), biased representation of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and sea surface temperature biases in the Indian Ocean. Such biases hinder the representation in climate models of key coupled modes of variability and limit the ability of climate models to capture present and future climate variations.
We invite contributions aiming at process-based understanding of the coupled large-scale circulation across past, present, and future climates, addressing any of the following or similar topics: regional teleconnections, systematic biases in coupled climate models, non-local effects of air-sea interaction on AMOC variability, influence of the Indian Ocean on the Asian monsoon, and the coupled dynamics of the Hadley and Walker circulations.