Identification

Title

Improved simulations of atmospheric river climatology and variability in high‐resolution CESM

Abstract

Atmospheric rivers (ARs), referring to long and narrow filamentary bands of intense water vapor transport in the atmosphere, can cause extreme precipitation, floods, and drought events. Their variability has been linked to various climate modes, such as El Nino/Southern Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Pacific-North America pattern. Understanding and improving simulation of this linkage can provide the potential to predict ARs at subseasonal-to-decadal timescales. Up to now, the extent to which climate model simulations of ARs are dependent on model resolutions has not been fully assessed. Here, we compare and evaluate ARs in a pair of high-resolution (HR) and a low-resolution (LR) Community Earth System Model (CESM) simulations against the observations. The results show that within this CESM framework, climatological AR strength and associated precipitation are severely underestimated by LR compared to the observations, and their relationships with major modes of climate variability are also poorly reproduced. These deficiencies in LR are alleviated to a significant extent in HR. Using a linear regression analysis, we show that HR is able to capture with high fidelity the observed relationships between ARs and major climate modes in the Northern Hemisphere at seasonal-to-decadal time scales. These results suggest that the use of HR CESM may potentially lead to an improved forecast skill of ARs at season-to-decadal time scales.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7jq14t4

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2022-09-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact