Climatology of Borneo Vortices in the HadGEM3-GC31 General Circulation Model

Borneo Vortices (BVs) are intense precipitating winter storms that develop over the equatorial South China Sea and strongly affect the weather and climate over the western Maritime Continent due to their association with deep convection and heavy rainfall. In this study, the ability of the HadGEM3-GC31 (Hadley Centre Global Environment Model 3 - Global Coupled vn. 3.1) global climate model to simulate the climatology of BVs at different horizontal resolutions are examined using an objective feature tracking algorithm. The HadGEM3-GC31 at the N512 (25km) horizontal resolution simulates BVs with well-represented characteristics, including their frequency, spatial distribution and their lower-tropospheric structures when compared with BVs identified in a climate reanalysis, whereas the BVs in the N96 (~135 km) and N216 (~65 km) simulations are much weaker and less frequent. Also, the N512 simulation better captures the contribution of BVs to the winter precipitation in Borneo and Malay Peninsula compared with precipitation from a reanalysis data and from observations, while the N96 and N216 simulations underestimate this contribution due to the overly weak low-level convergence of the simulated BVs. The N512 simulation also exhibits an improved ability to reproduce the modulation of BV activity by the occurrence of northeasterly cold surges and active phases of Madden-Julian Oscillation in the region, including increased BV track densities, intensities and lifetimes. A sufficiently high model resolution is thus found to be important to realistically simulate the present-climate precipitation extremes associated with BVs and to study their possible changes in a warmer climate.