When Will Humanity Notice Its Influence on Atmospheric Rivers?

Abstract

Atmospheric rivers (ARs), river-like plumes of intense atmospheric moisture transport (Newell et al., 1992) typically associated with extratropical cyclones (Zhang et al., 2019), are known for their great socioeconomic impacts worldwide. ARs occur less than 10% of the time but account for more than 30% of the annual precipitation over some populated mid-latitude regions, such as the West Coast of the United States and Western Europe, which indicates both their water resource value and the potential hazards of landfalling ARs (Dettinger, 2013;Slinskey et al., 2020). For example, in 2016-2017, a series of AR events terminated a multi-year drought in California (White et al., 2019). However, ARs also contribute to more than 84% of flash flood damage in the West Coast of the United States (Corringham et al., 2019), which is one of the most costly natural disasters. In addition to the local impacts, ARs play an important role in global climate. ARs determine about 90% of pole-ward moisture transport (Zhu & Newell, 1998), which is one potential driver of Arctic amplification through modulation of the energy and moisture budgets around polar regions (Nash et al., 2018). Due to the important role of ARs

Atmospheric River Sequences as Indicators of Hydrologic Hazard in Historical Reanalysis and GFDL SPEAR Future Climate Projections

“…This paper uses a five‐member subset of the larger thirty‐member SPEAR ensemble and uses IVT and AR statistics as calculated by Tseng et al. (2022). Tseng et al.…”

“…We are therefore confident in SPEAR's ability to resolve both local climate trends in California and global circulation patterns relevant to ARs. This paper uses a five-member subset of the larger thirty-member SPEAR ensemble and uses IVT and AR statistics as calculated by Tseng et al (2022). Tseng et al (2022) have demonstrated that the AR statistics derived from a single ensemble member are still representative of the entire large ensemble, provided the analysis period is sufficiently long (≥30 years), given the short memory of AR events from season to season.…”

“…This paper uses a five-member subset of the larger thirty-member SPEAR ensemble and uses IVT and AR statistics as calculated by Tseng et al (2022). Tseng et al (2022) have demonstrated that the AR statistics derived from a single ensemble member are still representative of the entire large ensemble, provided the analysis period is sufficiently long (≥30 years), given the short memory of AR events from season to season. We examined simulations with historical forcing and with projected forcings following two different shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs).…”

“…Climate model projections were retrieved from GFDL SPEAR (Delworth et al, 2020). This paper uses a five-member subset of the larger thirty-member SPEAR ensemble and uses IVT and AR statistics as calculated by Tseng et al (2022). Calculations were performed using R and Sherlock, Stanford University's high-performance computing cluster.…”

Future changes in boreal winter ENSO teleconnections in a large ensemble of high-resolution climate simulations

“…The version of SPEAR we analyze here [SPEAR_MED in the notation of Delworth et al (2020) but referred here as SPEAR for simplicity] has 33 vertical levels with a model top at 1 hPa in the atmosphere, a horizontal grid spacing of 0.5 • in the atmosphere and land components, and approximate 1 • horizontal spacing (telescoping to 0.33 • meridional spacing near the equator) in the ocean and sea ice components. SPEAR has been successfully used for studies of climate variability, prediction, and projection spanning subseasonal (Xiang et al, 2022), seasonal (Bushuk et al, 2021(Bushuk et al, , 2022Tseng et al, 2021;Jia et al, 2022), decadal (Joh et al, 2022), and multidecadal (Murakami et al, 2020;Pascale et al, 2020;Tseng et al, 2022) timescales.…”