Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
Half the worlds population already experiences years 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial
Published: 2019-03-12
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5 °C above preindustrial. A natural question for the public to ask is “But how much warmer than preindustrial is where I live?” We develop a pattern-scaling technique to present local annually-resolved, gridded temperature anomalies prior to the industrial burning of fossil fuels. On average the past 5 years, [...]
Heavy rainfall in Paraguay during the 2015-2016 austral summer: causes and sub-seasonal-to-seasonal predictive skill
Published: 2019-02-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
During the austral summer 2015/16, severe flooding displaced over 170 000 people on the Paraguay River system in Paraguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil. These floods were driven by repeated heavy rainfall events in the lower Paraguay River basin. Alternating sequences of enhanced moisture inflow from the South American low-level jet and local convergence associated with baroclinic systems were [...]
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a major source of uncertainty in projections of population-weighted surface temperature under climate change.
Published: 2019-02-06
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rising global mean temperatures and an increase in the fraction of the population living in urban areas is leading to a number of grand challenges. Contrasting area-weighted and population-weighted trends in an ensemble of CMIP5 climate model simulations under a range of climate and population change scenarios (RCPs and SSPs) shows that population-weighted changes in future surface temperature [...]
Dynamics of ITCZ width: Ekman processes, non-Ekman processes and links to sea-surface temperature
Published: 2019-01-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The dynamical processes controlling the width of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) are investigated using idealized simulations. ITCZ width is defined in terms of boundary-layer vertical velocity. The tropical boundary layer is approximately in Ekman balance suggesting that wind stress places a strong constraint on ITCZ width. A scaling based on Ekman balance predicts that ITCZ width is [...]
A statistics-based reconstruction of high-resolution global terrestrial climate for the last 800,000 years
Published: 2019-01-18
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Curated global climate data have been generated from climate model outputs for the last 120,000 years, whereas reconstructions going back even further have been lacking due to the high computational cost of climate simulations. Here, we present a statistically-derived global terrestrial climate dataset for every 1,000 years of the last 800,000 years. It is based on a set of linear regressions [...]
Comparing the Euro 2k reconstruction to a regional climate model simulation
Published: 2018-12-20
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We do not expect simulations and reconstructions of past climate change to agree on the exact evolution of past climate variations. Simulations with sophisticated climate models present spatially discrete but complete estimates, which are consistent relative to the implemented physics and their uncertain forcing data. Reconstruction methods statistically infer past changes from natural archives [...]
Attributing Historical and Future Evolution of Radiative Feedbacks to Regional Warming Patterns using a Green’s Function Approach: The Preeminence of the Western Pacific
Published: 2018-12-18
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Global radiative feedbacks have been found to vary in global climate model (GCM) simulations. Atmospheric GCMs (AGCMs) driven with historical patterns of sea-surface temperatures (SST) and sea-ice concentrations produce radiative feedbacks that trend toward more negative values, implying low climate sensitivity, over recent decades. Freely-evolving coupled GCMs driven by increasing CO2 produce [...]
Separating the impact of individual land surface properties on the terrestrial surface energy budget in both the coupled and un-coupled land-atmosphere system
Published: 2018-12-12
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Changes in the land surface can drive large responses in the atmosphere on local, regional, and global scales. Surface properties control the partitioning of energy within the surface energy budget to fluxes of shortwave and longwave radiation, sensible and latent heat, and ground heat storage. Changes in surface energy fluxes can impact the atmosphere across scales through changes in [...]
Extreme weather events in early Summer 2018 connected by a recurrent hemispheric wave-7 pattern.
Published: 2018-11-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The summer of 2018 witnessed a number of extreme weather events such as heatwaves in North America, Western Europe and the Caspian Sea region and rainfall extremes in South-East Europe and Japan that occurred near-simultaneously. Here we show that these extremes were connected by an amplified hemisphere-wide wavenumber 7 circulation pattern. We show that this pattern constitutes a teleconnection [...]
Spatial variability of late Holocene and 20th century sea-level rise along the Atlantic coast of the United States
Published: 2018-11-06
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Accurate estimates of global sea-level rise in the pre-satellite era provide a context for 21st century sea-level predictions, but the use of tide-gauge records is complicated by the contributions from changes in land level due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). We have constructed a rigorous quality-controlled database of late Holocene sea-level indices from the U.S. Atlantic coast, [...]
Guidance on the homogenization of climate station data
Published: 2018-11-06
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Draft guidance on the homogenisation of climate station data of the World Meteorological Organisation.
Estimating Transient Climate Response in a large-ensemble global climate model simulation
Published: 2018-10-11
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The transient climate response (TCR), defined to be the warming in near-surface air temperature after 70 years of a 1% per year increase in CO2, can be estimated from observed warming over the 19th and 20th centuries. Such analyses yield lower values than TCR estimated from global climate models (GCMs). This disagreement has been used to suggest that GCMs’ climate may be too sensitive to [...]
Lake area constraints on past hydroclimate in the western United States: Application to Pleistocene Lake Bonneville
Published: 2018-10-09
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Lake shoreline remnants found in basins of the western United States reflect wetter conditions during Pleistocene glacial periods. The size distribution of paleolakes, such as Lake Bonneville, provide a first-order constraint on the competition between regional precipitation delivery and evaporative demand. In this contribution we downscale previous work using lake mass balance equations and [...]
Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning
Published: 2018-09-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Climate, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Water resources planning requires making decisions about infrastructure development under substantial uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have [...]
A climatology of rain-on-snow events for Norway
Published: 2018-09-10
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rain-on-snow (ROS) events are complex multivariate hydrometeorological phenomena requiring a combination of rain and snowpack. Impacts include floods and landslides, and rain may freeze within the snowpack or on bare ground, potentially affecting vegetation, wildlife, and permafrost. ROS events occur mainly in high-latitude and mountainous areas, where sparse observational networks hinder [...]