The Climate-system Historical Forecast Project: do stratosphere-resolving models make better seasonal climate predictions in boreal winter?

Using an international, multi-model suite of historical forecasts from the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Climate-system Historical Forecast Project (CHFP), we compare the seasonal prediction skill in boreal wintertime between models that resolve the stratosphere and its dynamics (high-top') and models that do not (low-top'). We evaluate hindcasts that are initialized in November, and examine the model biases in the stratosphere and how they relate to boreal wintertime (December-March) seasonal forecast skill. We are unable to detect more skill in the high-top ensemble-mean than the low-top ensemble-mean in forecasting the wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation, but model performance varies widely. Increasing the ensemble size clearly increases the skill for a given model. We then examine two major processes involving stratosphere-troposphere interactions (the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO)) and how they relate to predictive skill on intraseasonal to seasonal time-scales, particularly over the North Atlantic and Eurasia regions. High-top models tend to have a more realistic stratospheric response to El Niño and the QBO compared to low-top models. Enhanced conditional wintertime skill over high latitudes and the North Atlantic region during winters with El Niño conditions suggests a possible role for a stratospheric pathway.

Generalized isotropic Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick models: ground state entanglement and quantum entropies

We introduce a new class of generalized isotropic Lipkin–Meshkov–Glick models with su(m+1) spin and long-range non-constant interactions, whose non-degenerate ground state is a Dicke state of su(m+1) type. We evaluate in closed form the reduced density matrix of a block of Lspins when the whole system is in its ground state, and study the corresponding von Neumann and Rényi entanglement entropies in the thermodynamic limit. We show that both of these entropies scale as a log L when L tends to infinity, where the coefficient a is equal to (m  −  k)/2 in the ground state phase with k vanishing magnon densities. In particular, our results show that none of these generalized Lipkin–Meshkov–Glick models are critical, since when L-->∞ their Rényi entropy R_q becomes independent of the parameter q. We have also computed the Tsallis entanglement entropy of the ground state of these generalized su(m+1) Lipkin–Meshkov–Glick models, finding that it can be made extensive by an appropriate choice of its parameter only when m-k≥3. Finally, in the su(3) case we construct in detail the phase diagram of the ground state in parameter space, showing that it is determined in a simple way by the weights of the fundamental representation of su(3). This is also true in the su(m+1) case; for instance, we prove that the region for which all the magnon densities are non-vanishing is an (m  +  1)-simplex in R^m whose vertices are the weights of the fundamental representation of su(m+1).