Objective cyclone climatologies of the North Atlantic – a comparison between the ECMWF and NCEP Reanalyses     

C. E. Hanson  J. P. Palutikof  T. D. Davies 《Climate Dynamics》2004,22(6-7):757-769

Simple and easily reproducible techniques have been used to construct two objective cyclone climatologies of the North Atlantic-European sector. The goal of this study is to increase understanding of cyclones with the potential to cause damage, in particular, those reaching Beaufort category 7 and above. The two climatologies constructed here span the period 1979–2000 and have been developed from reanalysis mean sea level pressure data from the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts) and NCEP (National Centres for Environmental Prediction). The ECMWF reanalysis data are only available for 15 years, and have been extended from 1994 using operational analyses. The major temporal and spatial characteristics of North Atlantic cyclones are examined and a comparison between the climatologies developed from the two data sets is carried out. The well-known cyclogenesis regions along the east coast of the United States and to the southeast of Greenland are replicated by both reanalyses, as is the characteristic southwest/northeast orientation of the dominant cyclone track across the Atlantic basin. However, only weak correlations are found between the time series of cyclone frequency produced from the two reanalyses, and this is particularly true for the lower intensity Beaufort Scale category 0–6 cyclones. This result, together with the large differences in the spatial distribution of cyclones over Greenland for Beaufort Scale 0–6 cyclones, indicates the NCEP reanalyses generates fewer systems than the ECMWF reanalyses. The overall conclusion is that the ECMWF mean sea level pressure data produce a more comprehensive climatology of North Atlantic cyclones at all scales.  相似文献   

Elevated stratified layers observed with sodar during VTMX     

R. L. Coulter  M. S. Pekour  T. J. Martin 《Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics》2004,85(1-3):115-123

Summary A combination of low frequency sodar, radar wind profiler and in-situ balloon-borne measurements of temperature and water vapor have been used to investigate the structure of elevated stratified layers within the transition layer above the nocturnal boundary layer during the Vertical Transport and Mixing Field Campaign in Salt Lake City Utah, during October, 2000. Elevated layers determined from sodar and radar vertical time sections were penetrated with a balloon-born instrument package to determine the fine scale temperature and moisture structure of the layers. As expected a potential temperature increase was found in the upper half of the layers; however the magnitude was considerably smaller than found above the daytime well-mixed layer and the vertical distance of the increase was quite variable. Mixing ratio, in the mean was found to have a relative maximum in the lower portion of the layers. It was found that the potential temperature within the layers decreased with time relative to background values, regardless of whether the layer descended or ascended.  相似文献   

Observed monthly precipitation trends in China 1951–2002     

M. Gemmer  S. Becker  T. Jiang 《Theoretical and Applied Climatology》2004,77(1-2):39-45

Summary Monthly precipitation trends of 160 stations in China from 1951–2002 have been analysed and interpolated. The Mann-Kendall trend test was applied to examine the monthly precipitation data. Significant positive and negative trends at the 90, 95, and 99 percent confidence levels were detected for numerous stations. The number, distribution, and direction of the trends varied from month to month.The detected trends were spatially interpolated by applying the Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation method. The spatial presentation of the detected precipitation trends gives a better understanding of climatic changes or variations in China during the last 50 years. This is especially the case for highlighting the spatial structure of precipitation trends.A clustering of trends is observed in certain months, including distinct trend belts especially in east and north-east China. Nevertheless, positive as well as negative monthly trends can be noted simultaneously in different areas. The spatial interpolation of precipitation trend analysis results is a useful approach to give further understanding of the regional pattern of precipitation trends in China.  相似文献   

Estimation of Regional Evapotranspiration by Combining Aircraftand Ground-Based Measurements     

P. R. Isaac  R. Leuning  J. M. Hacker  H. A. Cleugh  P. A. Coppin  O. T. Denmead  M. R. Raupach 《Boundary-Layer Meteorology》2004,110(1):69-98

Two methods are examined for combining measurements from instrumented aircraftand towers to estimate regional scale evapotranspiration. Aircraft data provided spatially averaged values of properties of the surface, the evaporative fraction and maximum stomatal conductance. These quantities are less sensitive to meteorological conditions than the turbulent fluxes of heat and water vapour themselves. The methods allowed aircraft data collected over several days to be averaged and thus to reduce the random error associated with the temporal under-sampling inherent in aircraft measurements. Evaporative fraction is estimated directly from the aircraft data, while maximum stomatal conductance is estimated by coupling the Penman–Monteith equation to a simple model relating surface conductance to the incoming shortwave radiation and specific humidity saturation deficit. The spatial averages of evaporative fraction and maximum stomatal conductance can then be used with routine tower data to estimate the regional scale evapotranspiration. Data from aircraft flights and six ground based sites during the OASIS field campaign in south–east New South Wales in 1995 have been used to check the methods. Both the evaporative fraction and the maximum stomatal conductance derived from the aircraft data give information on the spatial variability of the surface energy budget at scales from 10 to 100 km. Daily averaged latent heat fluxes estimated using these methods for the OASIS study region agree with the available observations in quasi-stationary conditions or in weakly non-stationary conditions when the data from several aircraft flights are averaged to reduce the impact of short term imbalances in the surface energy budget.  相似文献   

Twentieth century North Atlantic climate change. Part II: Understanding the effect of Indian Ocean warming     

M. P. Hoerling  J. W. Hurrell  T. Xu  G. T. Bates  A. S. Phillips 《Climate Dynamics》2004,23(3-4):391-405

Ensembles of atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) experiments are used in an effort to understand the boreal winter Northern Hemisphere (NH) extratropical climate response to the observed warming of tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over the last half of the twentieth Century. Specifically, we inquire about the origins of unusual, if not unprecedented, changes in the wintertime North Atlantic and European climate that are well described by a linear trend in most indices of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The simulated NH atmospheric response to the linear trend component of tropic-wide SST change since 1950 projects strongly onto the positive polarity of the NAO and is a hemispheric pattern distinguished by decreased (increased) Arctic (middle latitude) sea level pressure. Progressive warming of the Indian Ocean is the principal contributor to this wintertime extratropical response, as shown through additional AGCM ensembles forced with only the SST trend in that sector. The Indian Ocean influence is further established through the reproducibility of results across three different models forced with identical, idealized patterns of the observed warming. Examination of the transient atmospheric adjustment to a sudden “switch-on” of an Indian Ocean SST anomaly reveals that the North Atlantic response is not consistent with linear theory and most likely involves synoptic eddy feedbacks associated with changes in the North Atlantic storm track. The tropical SST control exerted over twentieth century regional climate underlies the importance of determining the future course of tropical SST for regional climate change and its uncertainty. Better understanding of the extratropical responses to different, plausible trajectories of the tropical oceans is key to such efforts.  相似文献   

The ACPI Climate Change Simulations     

Aiguo Dai  W. M. Washington  G. A. Meehl  T. W. Bettge  W. G. Strand 《Climatic change》2004,62(1-3):29-43

The Parallel Climate Model (PCM) has been used in the Accelerated ClimatePrediction Initiative (ACPI) Program to simulate the global climateresponse to projected CO₂, sulfate, and other greenhouse gasforcingunder a business-as-usual emissions scenario during the 21st century. In these runs, the oceans were initialized to 1995 conditions by a group from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other institutions. An ensemble of three model runs was then carried out to the year 2099 using the projected forcing. Atmospheric data fromthese runs were saved at 6-hourly intervals (hourly for certain criticalfields) to support the ACPI objective of accurately modeling hydrologicalcycles over the western U.S. It is shown that the initialization to1995 conditions partly removes the un-forced oceanic temperature and salinity drifts that occurred in the standard 20th century integration. The ACPI runs show a global surface temperature increase of 3–8 °C over northern high-latitudes by the end of the 21st century, and 1–2 °C over the oceans. This is generally within ±0.1°Cof model runs without the 1995 ocean initialization. The exception is in theAntarctic circumpolar ocean where surface air temperature is cooler in theACPI run; however the ensemble scatter is large in this region. Althoughthe difference in climate at the end of the 21st century is minimalbetween the ACPI runs and traditionally spun up runs, it might be largerfor CGCMs with higher climate sensitivity or larger ocean drifts. Ourresults suggest that the effect of small errors in the oceans (such asthose associated with climate drifts) on CGCM-simulated climate changesfor the next 50–100 years may be negligible.  相似文献   

Mitigating the Effects of Climate Change on the Water Resources of the Columbia River Basin   总被引：5，自引：3，他引：5  

Jeffrey T. Payne  Andrew W. Wood  Alan F. Hamlet  Richard N. Palmer  Dennis P. Lettenmaier 《Climatic change》2004,62(1-3):233-256

The potential effects of climate change on the hydrology and water resources of the Columbia River Basin (CRB) were evaluated using simulations from the U.S. Department of Energy and National Center for Atmospheric Research Parallel Climate Model (DOE/NCAR PCM). This study focuses on three climate projections for the 21st century based on a `business as usual' (BAU) global emissions scenario, evaluated with respect to a control climate scenario based on static 1995 emissions. Time-varying monthly PCM temperature and precipitation changes were statistically downscaled and temporally disaggregated to produce daily forcings that drove a macro-scale hydrologic simulation model of the Columbia River basin at 1/4-degree spatial resolution. For comparison with the direct statistical downscaling approach, a dynamical downscaling approach using a regional climate model (RCM) was also used to derive hydrologic model forcings for 20-year subsets from the PCM control climate (1995–2015) scenario and from the three BAU climate(2040–2060) projections. The statistically downscaled PCM scenario results were assessed for three analysis periods (denoted Periods 1–3: 2010–2039,2040–2069, 2070–2098) in which changes in annual average temperature were +0.5,+1.3 and +2.1 °C, respectively, while critical winter season precipitation changes were –3, +5 and +1 percent. For RCM, the predicted temperature change for the 2040–2060 period was +1.2 °C and the average winter precipitation change was –3 percent, relative to the RCM controlclimate. Due to the modest changes in winter precipitation, temperature changes dominated the simulated hydrologic effects by reducing winter snow accumulation, thus shifting summer streamflow to the winter. The hydrologic changes caused increased competition for reservoir storage between firm hydropower and instream flow targets developed pursuant to the Endangered Species Act listing of Columbia River salmonids. We examined several alternative reservoir operating policies designed to mitigate reservoir system performance losses. In general, the combination of earlier reservoir refill with greater storage allocations for instream flow targets mitigated some of the negative impacts to flow, but only with significant losses in firm hydropower production (ranging from –9 percent in Period1 to –35 percent for RCM). Simulated hydropower revenue changes were lessthan 5 percent for all scenarios, however, primarily due to small changes inannual runoff.  相似文献   

Century-Scale Change in Water Availability: CO2-Quadrupling Experiment     

S. Manabe  R. T. Wetherald  P. C. D. Milly  T. L. Delworth  R. J. Stouffer 《Climatic change》2004,64(1-2):59-76

It has been suggested that, unless a major effort is made, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide may rise above four times the pre-industrial level in a few centuries. Here we use a coupled atmosphere-ocean-land model to explore the response of the global water cycle to such a large increase in carbon dioxide, focusing on river discharge and soil moisture. Our results suggest that water is going to be more plentiful in those regions of the world that are already `water-rich'. However, water stresses will increase significantly in regions and seasons that are already relatively dry. This could pose a very challenging problem for water-resource management around the world. For soil moisture, our results indicate reductions during much of the year in many semi-arid regions of the world, such as the southwestern region of North America, the northeastern region of China, the Mediterranean coast of Europe, and the grasslands of Australia and Africa. In some of these regions, soil moisture values are reduced by almost a factor of two during the dry season. The drying in semi-arid regions is likely to induce the outward expansion of deserts to the surrounding regions. Over extensive regions of both the Eurasian and North American continents in high and middle latitudes, soil moisture decreases in summer but increases in winter, in contrast to the situation in semi-arid regions. For river discharge, our results indicate an average increase of ～ 15% during the next few centuries. The discharges from Arctic rivers such as the Mackenzie and Ob' increase by much larger fractions. In the tropics, the discharges from the Amazonas and Ganga-Brahmaputra also increase considerably. However, the percentage changes in runoff from other tropical and many mid-latitude rivers are smaller.  相似文献   

Estimation of Site Effects in Beijing City   总被引：6，自引：0，他引：6  

Z. Ding  Y. T. Chen  G. F. Panza 《Pure and Applied Geophysics》2004,161(5-6):1107-1123

— For the realistic modeling of the seismic ground motion in lateral heterogeneous anelastic media, the database of 3-D geophysical structures for Beijing City has been built up to model the seismic ground motion in the City, caused by the 1976 Tangshan and the 1998 Zhangbei earthquakes. The hybrid method, which combines the modal summation and the finite-difference algorithms, is used in the simulation. The modeling of the seismic ground motion, for both the Tangshan and the Zhangbei earthquakes, shows that the thick Quaternary sedimentary cover amplifies the peak values and increases the duration of the seismic ground motion in the northwestern part of the City. Therefore the thickness of the Quaternary sediments in Beijing City is the key factor controling the local ground effects. Four zones are defined on the base of the different thickness of the Quaternary sediments. The response spectra for each zone are computed, indicating that peak spectral values as high as 0.1 g are compatible with past seismicity and can be well exceeded if an event similar to the 1697 Sanhe-Pinggu occurs.  相似文献   

Space-time mapping of soil salinity using probabilistic bayesian maximum entropy     

A. Douaik  M. van Meirvenne  T. Tóth  M. Serre 《Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (SERRA)》2004,18(4):219-227

The mapping of saline soils is the first task before any reclamation effort. Reclamation is based on the knowledge of soil salinity in space and how it evolves with time. Soil salinity is traditionally determined by soil sampling and laboratory analysis. Recently, it became possible to complement these hard data with soft secondary data made available using field sensors like electrode probes. In this study, we had two data sets. The first includes measurements of field salinity (EC_a) at 413 locations and 19 time instants. The second, which is a subset of the first (13 to 20 locations), contains, in addition to EC_a, salinity determined in the laboratory (EC_2.5). Based on a procedure of cross-validation, we compared the prediction performance in the space-time domain of 3 methods: kriging using either only hard data (HK) or hard and mid interval soft data (HMIK), and Bayesian maximum entropy (BME) using probabilistic soft data. We found that BME was less biased, more accurate and giving estimates, which were better correlated with the observed values than the two kriging techniques. In addition, BME allowed one to delineate with better detail saline from non-saline areas.  相似文献