Response of Atmospheric Energy to Historical Climate Change in CMIP5

Three forms of atmospheric energy, i.e., internal, potential, and latent, are analyzed based on the histor-ical simulations of 32 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models and two reanalysis datasets (NCEP/NCAR and ERA-40). The spatial pattern of climatological mean atmospheric energy is well reproduced by all CMIP5 models. The variation of globally averaged atmospheric energy is similar to that of surface air temperature (SAT) for most models. The atmospheric energy from both simulation and reanalysis decreases following the volcanic eruption in low-latitude zones. Generally, the climatological mean of simulated atmospheric energy from most models is close to that obtained from NCEP/NCAR, while the simulated atmospheric energy trend is close to that obtained from ERA-40. Under a certain variation of SAT, the simulated global latent energy has the largest increase ratio, and the increase ratio of potential energy is the smallest.