  We compare, for the overlapping time frame 1962-2000, the estimate of the
northern hemisphere (NH) mid-latitude winter atmospheric variability within the
XX century simulations of 17 global climate models (GCMs) included in the
IPCC-4AR with the NCEP and ECMWF reanalyses. We compute the Hayashi spectra of
the 500hPa geopotential height fields and introduce an integral measure of the
variability observed in the NH on different spectral sub-domains. Only two
high-resolution GCMs have a good agreement with reanalyses. Large biases, in
most cases larger than 20%, are found between the wave climatologies of most
GCMs and the reanalyses, with a relative span of around 50%. The travelling
baroclinic waves are usually overestimated, while the planetary waves are
usually underestimated, in agreement with previous studies performed on global
weather forecasting models. When comparing the results of various versions of
similar GCMs, it is clear that in some cases the vertical resolution of the
atmosphere and, somewhat unexpectedly, of the adopted ocean model seem to be
critical in determining the agreement with the reanalyses. The GCMs ensemble is
biased with respect to the reanalyses but is comparable to the best 5 GCMs.
This study suggests serious caveats with respect to the ability of most of the
presently available GCMs in representing the statistics of the global scale
atmospheric dynamics of the present climate and, a fortiori, in the perspective
of modelling climate change.
