ALBERT

Beschreibung: During the summer of 2010, an unusually persistent blocking episode resulted in anomalously warm dry weather over the European part of Russia. The excessive heat resulted in forest and peat fires, impacted terrestrial ecosystems, greatly increased pollution in urban areas, and increased mortality rates in the region. Using the National Centers for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis datasets, the climatological and dynamic character of blocking events for summer 2010 and a precursor May blocking event were examined. We found that these events were stronger and longer lived than typical warm season events. Using dynamic methods, we demonstrate that the July 2010 event was a synoptic-scale dominant blocking event; unusual in the summer season. An analysis of phase diagrams demonstrated that the planetary-scale did not become stable until almost one week after block onset. For all other blocking events studied here and previously, the planetary-scale became stable around onset. Analysis using area integrated regional enstrophy (IRE) demonstrated that for the July 2010 event, synoptic-scale IRE increased at block onset. This was similar for the May 2010 event, but different from case studies examined previously that demonstrated the planetary-scale IRE was prominent at block onset.

Beschreibung: We employ a nested system of global and regional climate models, linked to regional and urban air quality chemical transport models utilizing detailed inventories of present and future emissions, to study the relative impact of climate change and changing air pollutant emissions on air quality and population exposure in Stockholm, Sweden. We show that climate change only marginally affects air quality over the 20-year period studied. An exposure assessment reveals that the population of Stockholm can expect considerably lower NO2 exposure in the future, mainly due to reduced local NOx emissions. Ozone exposure will decrease only slightly, due to a combination of increased concentrations in the city centre and decreasing concentrations in the suburban areas. The increase in ozone concentration is a consequence of decreased local NOx emissions, which reduces the titration of the long-range transported ozone. Finally, we evaluate the consequences of a planned road transit project on future air quality in Stockholm. The construction of a very large bypass road (including one of the largest motorway road tunnels in Europe) will only marginally influence total population exposure, this since the improved air quality in the city centre will be complemented by deteriorated air quality in suburban, residential areas.

Beschreibung: The United States Department of Agriculture classifies plant hardiness zones based on mean annual minimum temperatures over some past period (currently 1976–2005). Since temperatures are changing, these values may benefit from updating. I outline a multistep methodology involving imputation of missing station values, geostatistical interpolation, and time series smoothing to update a climate variable’s expected value compared to a climatology period and apply it to estimating annual minimum temperature change over the coterminous United States. I show using hindcast experiments that trend estimation gives more accurate predictions of minimum temperatures 1-2 years in advance compared to the previous 30 years’ mean alone. I find that annual minimum temperature increased roughly 2.5 times faster than mean temperature (~2.0 K versus ~0.8 K since 1970), and is already an average of 1.2 ± 0.5 K (regionally up to ~2 K) above the 1976–2005 mean, so that much of the country belongs to warmer hardiness zones compared to the current map. The methods developed may also be applied to estimate changes in other climate variables and geographic regions.

Beschreibung: Relationships between simultaneous occurrences of distinctive atmospheric easterly wave (EW) signatures that cross the south-equatorial Atlantic, intense mesoscale convective systems (lifespan > 2 hour) that propagate westward over the western south-equatorial Atlantic, and subsequent strong rainfall episodes (anomaly > 10 mm·day−1) that occur in eastern Northeast Brazil (ENEB) are investigated. Using a simple diagnostic analysis, twelve cases with EW lifespan ranging between 3 and 8 days and a mean velocity of 8 m·s−1 were selected and documented during each rainy season of 2004, 2005, and 2006. These cases, which represent 50% of the total number of strong rainfall episodes and 60% of the rainfall amount over the ENEB, were concomitant with an acceleration of the trade winds over the south-equatorial Atlantic, an excess of moisture transported westward from Africa to America, and a strengthening of the convective activity in the oceanic region close to Brazil. Most of these episodes occurred during positive sea surface temperature anomaly patterns over the entire south-equatorial Atlantic and low-frequency warm conditions within the oceanic mixing layer. A real-time monitoring and the simulation of this ocean-atmosphere relationship could help in forecasting such dramatic rainfall events.

Beschreibung: Ozone fluxes, derived from gradient measurements in Northeast Atlantic coastal waters, were observed to depend on both tide height and solar radiation. Peak ozone fluxes of −0.26±0.04 μg m-2 s-1 occurred during low-tide conditions when exposed microalgae fields contributed to the flux footprint. Additionally, at mid-to-high tide, when water surfaces contribute predominantly to the flux footprint, fluxes of the order of −0.12±0.03 μg m-2 s-1 were observed. Considering only fluxes over water covered surfaces, and using an advanced ozone deposition model that accounts for surface-water chemistry enhancing the deposition sink, it is demonstrated that a photochemical enhancement reaction with dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is required to explain the enhanced ozone deposition during daylight hours. This sink amounts to an ozone loss rate of up to 0.6 ppb per hour under peak solar irradiance and points to a missing sink in the marine boundary layer ozone budget.

Beschreibung: This paper describes life cycle and moisture sources of mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) observed over western Colombia. Results show that, in general, MCS are more frequent during boreal summer and autumn, and particularly, systems observed in summer season present longer life and larger extension. On the continent, MCS genesis is strongly affected by sea breeze and diurnal heating and presents a peak from 15 to 18 LST. For oceanic systems, the main genesis period is later, from 00 to 03 LST. Continental and oceanic systems present a tendency of westward displacement. Analysis using a Lagrangian approach implemented to estimate air parcel trajectories suggests that, during boreal winter, the main moisture sources are from the Caribbean Sea and tropical north Atlantic, possibly resulting from the moisture-laden trade winds and the land-ocean temperature contrast over northern South America. In summer, it is clear the influence of ITCZ positioning with moisture particles traveling from the tropical Atlantic over Amazonian river basin. In Autumn, Chilean-Peruvian Pacific is the main moisture source, confirming the importance of Chocó low level jet to MCS genesis.

Beschreibung: 1992 to 2002 data from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) were used to investigate water budget on five land use areas: urban, forest, agriculture, lake, and wetland in the state of Florida, USA. The data were evaluated based on the anomalies of rainfall, evaporation, and soil moisture from the average condition. The anomalies were used to investigate the effect of extreme conditions on water budget parameters for various land uses in both northeast and south of Florida. The results showed that extreme events such as La Niña strongly affected the water budget on land-use areas in both regions as the negative monthly rainfall anomalies were observed during the 1999-2000 event, while EI Niño and thunderstorms in summer caused positive rainfall anomalies with more than 70% in all study areas. Higher rainfall led to higher soil moisture anomalies for the agriculture, forest, and wetland from 1992 to May 1998 in both study regions. However, soil moisture becomes primary source for evaporation in drier conditions, and differences in capacity of plants access water, often dictated by the rooting depth, can result in contrasting evaporative losses across vegetation types. Hence, the forest, which had the deeper roots, had lower soil moisture anomalies, but higher evaporation anomalies than agriculture area during the drought event.

Beschreibung: Atmospheric profiles (temperature, pressure, and humidity) are commonly used parameters for aerosols and cloud properties retrievals. In preparation of the launch of the Global Change Observation Mission-Climate/Second-Generation GLobal Imager (GCOM-C/SGLI) satellite, an evaluation study on the sensitivity of atmospheric models to variations of atmospheric conditions is conducted. In this evaluation, clear sky and above low clouds water vapour radiances of the upper troposphere obtained from satellite observations and those simulated by atmospheric models are compared. The models studied are the Nonhydrostatic ICosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM) and the National Center for Environmental Protection/Department Of Energy (NCEP/DOE). The satellite observations are from the Terra/Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (Terra/MODIS) satellite. The simulations performed are obtained through a forward radiative transfer calculation procedure. The resulting radiances are transformed into the upper tropospheric brightness temperature (UTBT) and relative humidity (UTRH). The discrepancies between the simulated data and the observations are analyzed. These analyses show that both the NICAM and the NCEP/DOE simulated UTBT and UTRH have comparable distribution patterns. However the simulations’ differences with the observations are generally lower with the NCEP/DOE than with the NICAM. The NCEP/DOE model outputs very often overestimate the UTBT and therefore present a drier upper troposphere. The impact of the lower troposphere instability (dry convection) on the upper tropospheric moisture and the consequences on the models’ results are evaluated through a thunderstorm and moisture predictor (the K-stability index). The results obtained show a positive relation between the instability and the root mean square error (RMSE: observation versus models). The study of the impact of convective clouds shows that the area covered by these clouds increases with the humidity of the upper troposphere in clear sky and above low clouds, and at the same time, the error between the observations and the models also increases. The impact of the above low clouds heat distribution on the models is studied through the relation between the low clouds cover and their effective emissivity. The models’ error appears to be high at midrange effective emissivity clouds.

Beschreibung: This work assesses the effects of assimilating atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS) observations on typhoon prediction using the three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) and forecasting system of the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model. Two major parameters in the data assimilation scheme, the spatial decorrelation scale and the magnitude of the covariance matrix of the background error, are varied in forecast experiments for the track of typhoon Sinlaku over the Western Pacific. The results show that within a wide parameter range, the inclusion of the AIRS observation improves the prediction. Outside this range, notably when the decorrelation scale of the background error is set to a large value, forcing the assimilation of AIRS data leads to degradation of the forecast. This illustrates how the impact of satellite data on the forecast depends on the adjustable parameters for data assimilation. The parameter-sweeping framework is potentially useful for improving operational typhoon prediction.

Beschreibung: Effective Strength Index (ESI) is the relative strength of NAO and SO. ESI tendency is the algebraic difference between April-ESI and January-ESI and it represents the simultaneous evolution of NAO and SO from winter to spring. During positive (negative) phase of ESI tendency, NAO restores positive (negative) phase and SO restores negative (positive) phase before the beginning of summer season. Thus during contrasting phases (positive and negative) of ESI tendency, the evolution of NAO and SO is out of phase. In this paper we have studied the spatial and temporal variability of winter-time temperature field over Europe, Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal during contrasting phases of ESI tendency. The study reveals that during positive (negative) ESI tendency, smaller (larger) region of Europe is showing significant winter-time cooling (warming) at surface. The relationship between winter-time surface temperature over above regions and Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) also shows spatial and temporal variability. The probable explanation for this change in the relationship is discussed in the paper. Two sets of temperature parameters for two different phases of ESI tendency are found out. Multiple regression equations are developed for the prediction of ISMR in each phase of ESI tendency. The performance of these equations is also discussed in this paper.