Narrow corridors of water vapor transport known as atmospheric rivers (ARs) contribute to extreme precipitation and flooding along the West Coast of the United States, but knowledge of their influence over the interior is limited. Here, the authors use Interim European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim) data, Climate Prediction Center (CPC) precipitation analyses, and Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) observations to describe the characteristics of cool-season (November–April) ARs over the western United States. It is shown that AR frequency and duration exhibit a maximum along the Oregon–Washington coast, a strong transition zone upwind (west) of and over the Cascade–Sierra ranges, and a broad minimum that extends from the “high” Sierra south of Lake Tahoe eastward across the central Great Basin and into the deep interior. East of the Cascade–Sierra ranges, AR frequency and duration are largest over the interior northwest, while AR duration is large compared to AR frequency over the interior southwest. The fractions of cool-season precipitation and top-decile 24-h precipitation events attributable to ARs are largest over and west of the Cascade–Sierra ranges. Farther east, these fractions are largest over the northwest and southwest interior, with distinctly different large-scale patterns and AR orientations enabling AR penetration into each of these regions. In contrast, AR-related precipitation over the Great Basin east of the high Sierra is rare. These results indicate that water vapor depletion over major topographic barriers is a key contributor to AR decay, with ARs playing a more prominent role in the inland precipitation climatology where lower or less continuous topography facilitates the inland penetration of ARs.

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Although atmospheric rivers (ARs) typically weaken following landfall, those that penetrate inland can contribute to heavy precipitation and high-impact weather within the interior of western North America. In this paper, the authors examine the evolution of ARs over western North America using trajectories released at 950 and 700 hPa within cool-season ARs along the Pacific coast. These trajectories are classified as coastal decaying, inland penetrating, or interior penetrating based on whether they remain within an AR upon reaching selected transects over western North America. Interior-penetrating AR trajectories most frequently make landfall along the Oregon coast, but the greatest fraction of landfalling AR trajectories that eventually penetrate into the interior within an AR is found along the Baja Peninsula. In contrast, interior-penetrating AR trajectories rarely traverse the southern ''high'' Sierra. At landfall, interior-penetrating AR trajectories are associated with a more amplified flow pattern, more southwesterly (vs westerly) flow along the Pacific coast, and larger water vapor transport (qy). The larger initial qy of interior-penetrating AR trajectories is due primarily to larger initial water vapor q and wind speed y for those initiated at 950 and 700 hPa, respectively.Inland-and interior-penetrating AR trajectories maintain large qy over the interior partially due to increases in y that offset decreases in q, particularly in the vicinity of topographical barriers. Therefore, synoptic conditions and trajectory pathways favoring larger initial qy at the coast, limited water vapor depletion by orographic precipitation, and increases in y over the interior are keys to differentiating interior-penetrating from coastal-decaying ARs.

Emerging application areas such as air pollution in megacities, wind energy, urban security, and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles have intensified scientific and societal interest in mountain meteorology. To address scientific needs and help improve the prediction of mountain weather, the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a research effort—the Mountain Terrain Atmospheric Modeling and Observations (MATERHORN) Program—that draws the expertise of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, and multinational group of researchers. The program has four principal thrusts, encompassing modeling, experimental, technology, and parameterization components, directed at diagnosing model deficiencies and critical knowledge gaps, conducting experimental studies, and developing tools for model improvements. The access to the Granite Mountain Atmospheric Sciences Testbed of the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, as well as to a suite of conventional and novel high-end airborne and surface measurement platforms, has provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate phenomena of time scales from a few seconds to a few days, covering spatial extents of tens of kilometers down to millimeters. This article provides an overview of the MATERHORN and a glimpse at its initial findings. Orographic forcing creates a multitude of time-dependent submesoscale phenomena that contribute to the variability of mountain weather at mesoscale. The nexus of predictions by mesoscale model ensembles and observations are described, identifying opportunities for further improvements in mountain weather forecasting.

An evaluation of the surface sensible weather forecasts using high-density observations provided by the MesoWest cooperative networks illustrates the performance characteristics of the Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction (CIRP) Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) and the Eta Models over the western United States during the 2003 warm season (June–August). In general, CIRP WRF produced larger 2-m temperature and dewpoint mean absolute and bias errors (MAEs and BEs, respectively) than the Eta. CIRP WRF overpredicted the 10-m wind speed, whereas the Eta exhibited an underprediction with a comparable error magnitude to CIRP WRF. Tests using the Oregon State University (OSU) Land Surface Model (LSM) in CIRP WRF, instead of a simpler slab-soil model, suggest that using a more sophisticated LSM offers no overall advantage in reducing WRF BEs and MAEs for the aforementioned surface variables. Improvements in the initialization of soil temperature in the slab-soil model, however, did reduce the temperature bias in CIRP WRF. These results suggest that improvements in LSM initialization may be as or more important than improvements in LSM physics. A concerted effort must be undertaken to improve both the LSM initialization and parameterization of coupled land surface–boundary layer processes to produce more accurate surface sensible weather forecasts.

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Thermally driven wind systems in four regions of the Intermountain Basin are illustrated using analyses of meteorological data from the MesoWest network. AREAS OF STUDY. Four study regions were selected for investigation because they have high-density observations and illustrate typical thermally driven wind systems of the IW (Fig. 1). Here we introduce those regions, in turn, going counterclockwise around the IW. The Salt Lake, Tooele, and Rush Valleys, designated here as the WFV (Fig. 2a) are bounded by three