Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
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Draft guidance on the homogenisation of climate station data of the World Meteorological Organisation.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 [...]
Meridional atmospheric heat transport constrained by energetics and mediated by large-scale diffusion
Published: 2018-08-31
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Meridional atmospheric heat transport (AHT) has been investigated through three broad perspectives: dynamic perspective, linking AHT to the poleward flux of moist static energy (MSE) by atmospheric motions; an energetic perspective, linking AHT to energy input to the atmosphere by top-of-atmosphere radiation and surface heat fluxes; and a diffusive perspective, representing AHT in terms [...]
Why does Amazon precipitation decrease when tropical forests respond to increasing CO2?
Published: 2018-08-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth system models predict a zonal dipole of precipitation change over tropical South America, with decreases over the Amazon and increases over the Andes. Much of this has been attributed to the physiological response of the rainforest to elevated CO2, which describes a basin-wide reduction in stomatal conductance and transpiration. While robust in Earth system model experiments, details of [...]
Hamiltonian distributed chaos and predictability in large-scale climate dynamics
Published: 2018-08-14
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
It is shown that the large-scale climate dynamics, represented by the daily indices of the North Atlantic (NAO), Pacific/North American (PNA), Arctic (AO) and Antarctic (AAO) oscillations, Asian-Australian Monsoons (ISM, WNPM and AUSM) and El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Nino indices) as well as global temperature anomalies (land), is dominated by the Hamiltonian distributed chaos with the stretched [...]
Higher potential compound flood risk in Northern Europe under anthropogenic climate change
Published: 2018-07-18
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistics and Probability
The published version of this article is available at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw5531. Compound flooding (CF) is an extreme event taking place in low-lying coastal areas as a result of co-occurring high sea level and large amounts of runoff, caused by precipitation. The impact from the two hazards occurring individually can be significantly lower than the result of their [...]
What Even Is Climate?
Published: 2018-06-26
Subjects: Climate, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Although the concept of climate is easy to understand, there is not any uncontroversial definition of it. Most definitions fall back to the simple formulation that `climate is the statistics of weather. Recent attempts at a definition called versions of this saying vague. Climate is policy-relevant, and discussions on climate and climate change benefit from clarity on the topic. Beyond the policy [...]
A strong role for the AMOC in partitioning global energy transport and shifting ITCZ position in response to latitudinally discrete solar forcing in the CESM1.2
Published: 2018-06-14
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This preprint is a non peer reviewed version submitted to the Journal of Climate. This work has been accepted for publication with an updated title, A strong role for the AMOC in partitioning global energy transport and shifting ITCZ position in response to latitudinally discrete solar forcing in the CESM1.2. The accepted version is substantially different from the preprint version due to the [...]
Revisiting the surface-energy-flux perspective on the sensitivity of global precipitation to climate change
Published: 2018-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Climate models simulate an increase in global precipitation at a rate of approximately 1-3% per Kelvin of global surface warming. This change is often interpreted through the lens of the atmospheric energy budget, in which the increase in global precipitation is mostly offset by an increase in net radiative cooling. Other studies have provided different interpretations from the perspective of the [...]
Increasingly Powerful Tornadoes in the United States
Published: 2018-05-11
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Storm reports show an upward trend in the power of tornadoes from longer and wider paths and higher damage ratings. Quantifying the magnitude of the increase is difficult given diurnal and seasonal influences on tornadoes embedded within natural variations and made worse by changes for rating damage. Here the authors solve this problem by fitting a statistical model to a metric of power during [...]
The Extraordinary Mediocrity of the Holocene
Published: 2018-03-15
Subjects: Climate, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
The extinction of multiple genera of large-bodied mammals during the Holocene interglacial transition has been attributed to three hypothesized causes: human migration, climate change, and an extra-terrestrial impact. Two of these hypotheses, climate change and extra-terrestrial impactor, would predict that the Holocene interglacial transition was uniquely stressful for large-bodied mammals. To [...]