Recent changes of the tropical water and energy budget and of midlatitude circulations |
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| Authors: | H Flohn A Kapala H R Knoche H Mächel |
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| Institution: | (1) Universität Bonn, Meteorologisches Institut, Auf dem Hügel 20, W-5300 Bonn, Germany |
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| Abstract: | Rising atmospheric H2O content and temperature above the tropical Pacific (Hense et al. 1988) stimulated research on tropical ocean-atmosphere fluxes in the belt 10° S-14° N, based on COADS data for 1949–1979. Increasing sea-surface temperature was accompanied by regionally varying increases in the air-sea temperature and humidity gradients. The apparent rise in wind speed appeared to be only partly biased. Using several assumptions of the wind speed trend, increasing evaporation was found nearly everywhere. The best estimates vary regionally between 7% and 15%, with highest values above the warmest oceans between longitude 66° E and the date line. In the Atlantic, freshening surface waters (Levitus 1989) also suggest an increase of precipitation. Conversion of zonally averaged results into global estimates led to a rise of the energy input into the atmosphere, with a most plausible value of 8–10 W/m2. Since large-scale sea-surface warming appears to be induced by the greenhouse effect of CO2 combined with other trace gases, a powerful feedback mechanism — including H2O phase changes — should be responsible for the intensification of the hydrological cycle. This energy input of tropical origin seems to be larger — by a factor near 4 — than the  dry greenhouse effect. Such a well-founded conjecture of increasing internal/potential energy in the tropics suggests a similar rise of kinetic energy within the extratropical atmospheric circulation. This can be checked on the basis of daily operational hemispheric analyses of the German Weather Service, here using the period October 1961–March 1988. During the cold season they show, at the surface, a deepening of the Icelandic and Aleutian Lows by 6 and 10 hPa, respectively, and at the 50 kPa level an amplification of the baroclinic westerlies by 20–40%. Upper wind observation series have been used to check this strengthening of the westerlies and an expansion of the Aleutian Low. During the warm season, weaker changes in opposite directions are observed. While the observed facts are incompatible with many of the recent climate models, a few models (Wilson and Mitchell 1987, Hansen et al. 1988) using an advanced parameterization of tropical convection support the evolution of a powerful tropical heat source centred within mid-tropospheric layers. |
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