The rain deluge and flash floods of summer 2022 in the United Arab Emirates: Causes, analysis and perspectives on flood-risk reduction

Terry, James P.; Al Ruheili, Amna; Almarzooqi, Maitha Ali; Almheiri, Reem Yousuf; Alshehhi, Amani Khaled

doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2023.105013

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In the context of global climate warming, extreme precipitation events have become more frequent, leading to a significant increase in heavy precipitation [1][2][3][4][5]. Consequently, associated natural hazards such as flash floods, urban waterlogging, landslides, and debris flows are posing serious threats to society, the economy, and personal safety [6][7][8][9]. Despite substantial progress in comprehending the structure and lifespan of convective systems, accurately forecasting the convective initiation (CI, which refers to the process by which air particles gain and maintain positive buoyancy after being lifted above the level of free convection, eventually forming deep convective clouds) remains one of the biggest challenges in meteorology [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Case Study on the Convection Initiation Mechanisms of an Extreme Rainstorm over the Northern Slope of Kunlun Mountains, Xinjiang, Northwest China

Sun,

Abulikemu,

Yao

et al. 2023

Remote Sensing

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Extreme precipitation events have been occurring frequently worldwide, and their causative factors and convection initiation (CI) mechanisms have been attracting more and more attention in recent years. As a comprehensive study on the CI mechanisms of extreme rainstorms over the northern slope of the Kunlun Mountains (KLM), Xinjiang, based on both observational and high tempo-spatial numerical simulation, the major findings of this work are as follows: A cold pool (CP) was formed in the northwestern Tarim Basin under the influence of early precipitation evaporation, and it moved towards the northern slope of the KLM several hours before the CI. With the movement of the CP, a significant vertical temperature gradient was formed close to the leading edge of the CP, thereby enhancing local convective instability (up to ~10 PVU). In addition, the vertical shear of the horizontal winds at the leading edge of the CP led to a notable increase in the baroclinic component of moist potential vorticity, thus reinforcing the local conditional symmetric instability (up to ~8 PVU), providing another important unstable energy for the CI. In addition, the combined effect of the convergent lifting of a boundary layer jet (BLJ, the maximum wind speed below 1 km exceeding 10 m s−1) and the significant frontogenetical forcing (up to ~100 × 10−8 K m−1 s−1) at the leading edge of the CP were the causes of the release of the unstable energies. Further analysis of the frontogenetical forcing associated with the CP indicates that the convergence (up to ~2 × 10−3 s−1), diabatic heating and slantwise terms (indicates the baroclinicity and inhomogeneity of the vertical momentum in horizontal direction) were the major contributors, whereas the deformation term at the leading edge of the CP provided a relatively weaker contribution.

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