Fluxes coupling with climate

Sausen, R., Barthels, R. K., and Hasselmann, K. (1988). Coupled ocean-and atmospheric models with flux corrections. Climate Dynamics 2, 154-163. 

Another notorious problem of the coupled model is its tendency to drift to the states of atmosphere and ocean that are unlike the present states during a long time integration. In the noncoupled system, the bormdaiy conditions act as an anchor to the long-term trend of the model and the system cannot drift too far away from reality. By contrast, in the coupled system, because of the imperfection of the system, both the atmospheric and ocean models tend to drift toward their equilibrium states, which are sometimes far away fiom reality. This is called climate drift and is a cousin of the spin-up problem. In order to deal with this climate drift problem, techniques have been developed. They are based on the practice of flux correction, which makes a posteriori adjustments of various fluxes at the air-sea interface in order to prevent climate drift. Unfortunately, the correction terms are not necessarily small compared with the fluxes themselves. Therefore, the need of flux correction is indicative of the shortcoming in handling the interface conditions. 

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