A global climatology of atmospheric fronts

Berry, Gareth; Reeder, Michael J.; Jakob, Christian

doi:10.1029/2010gl046451

Cited by 164 publications

(279 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The fraction of wintertime in the CNTL experiment where F ≥ 1 for cold fronts and warm fronts is illustrated in Figures 2c and 2d, respectively. On average in the GS region, cold fronts occur roughly twice as frequently as warm fronts, in agreement with the results of Berry et al [2011]. Figure 3a illustrates the occurrence of F ≥ 1 in the SMTH experiment.…”

Section: Geophysical Research Letterssupporting

confidence: 79%

The atmospheric frontal response to SST perturbations in the Gulf Stream region

Parfitt

Czaja

Minobe

et al. 2016

Geophysical Research Letters

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The link between sea surface temperature (SST) gradients and atmospheric fronts is explored in a general circulation model across the Gulf Stream (GS) region from December to February 1981–2000. Two model experiments are analyzed, one with a realistic control SST distribution and one with a spatially smoothed SST distribution. The analysis shows a noticeable change in regional atmospheric frontal frequency between the two experiments (up to 30%), with the distribution of change exhibiting a clear imprint of the GS SST front. Further analysis of the surface sensible heat flux gradient across cold fronts reveals the pattern of change to be mediated by a thermal interaction between the oceanic and atmospheric fronts (“thermal damping and strengthening”). These results not only emphasize the significance of the GS SST gradient for storm development in the North Atlantic but also highlight the importance of resolution in assessing the role of frontal air‐sea interaction in midlatitude climate variability.

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Section: Geophysical Research Letterssupporting

confidence: 79%

The atmospheric frontal response to SST perturbations in the Gulf Stream region

Parfitt

Czaja

Minobe

et al. 2016

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…which was shown to provide similar results to a more sophisticated locator based on mean-axes (Hewson, 1998 ) identified by Berry et al (2011) are also excluded, as these often occur in regions of tropical convection, where the convective regime is more appropriate.…”

Section: Frontal Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Technical note: An automated cirrus classification

Gryspeerdt¹,

Quaas²,

Goren³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Abstract. Cirrus clouds play an important role in determining the radiation budget of the earth, but many of their properties remain uncertain, particularly their response to aerosol variations and to warming. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is the dependence of cirrus clouds on the mechanism of formation, which itself is strongly dependent on the local meteorological conditions. In this work, a classification system (Identification and Classification of Cirrus or IC-CIR) is introduced to identify cirrus 5clouds by their formation mechanisms. Using re-analysis and satellite data, cirrus clouds are separated in four main types: orographic, frontal, convective and in-situ. Through a comparison to convection-permitting model simulations and back-trajectory based analysis, it is shown that the regimes can provide extra information on the properties and origin of cirrus that could not be provided by the retrieved cloud properties or reanalysis data alone. This classification is designed to be easily implemented in GCMs, helping improve future model-observation comparisons and leading to improved parametrisations of cirrus cloud 10 processes.

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“…Since atmospheric fronts are so important for the day-today variability of weather, particularly in the mid-latitudes, a number of recent studies have taken advantage of the availability of global gridded reanalysis datasets to create climatologies of objectively identified atmospheric fronts (Berry et al 2011;Simmonds et al 2012). The study of Catto et al (2012a) combined the front identification methodology of Berry et al (2011) with the daily precipitation from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) to quantify the global proportion of precipitation that comes from fronts as well as the average precipitation when a front is present.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A global evaluation of fronts and precipitation in the ACCESS model

Catto¹,

Jakob²,

Nicholls³

2013

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How global precipitation will change in the future is of great socio-economic importance. It is therefore vital that climate models are able to adequately simulate the characteristics of precipitation and the individual precipitation events. Fronts play an important role in providing precipitation and they can be associated with heavy rain and flooding.In this paper the ACCESS1.3 atmosphere model is evaluated in terms of frontal and non-frontal precipitation. An objective front identification method is applied to data from reanalysis and the model. The fronts are then linked to daily precipitation from observational estimates and the model. The proportion of precipitation associated with fronts and the average intensity of precipitation associated with fronts are then calculated and compared.The frequency of fronts and the proportion of precipitation associated with fronts are well captured by the model. The intensity of precipitation when a front is present is underestimated by the model in most regions, consistent with many previous studies. Decomposing the total precipitation error into components associated with the frequency and intensity of both frontal and non-frontal precipitation shows that the non-frontal precipitation errors contribute the most to the total error, and that there are compensating errors in the model. This regime-and process-based method of model evaluation provides a useful tool to gain deeper understanding into the sources of precipitation errors in climate models.

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A global climatology of atmospheric fronts

Cited by 164 publications

References 11 publications

The atmospheric frontal response to SST perturbations in the Gulf Stream region

The atmospheric frontal response to SST perturbations in the Gulf Stream region

Technical note: An automated cirrus classification

A global evaluation of fronts and precipitation in the ACCESS model

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