Extreme weather and climate events with ecological relevance : a review

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.Series B, Biological Sciences, 372 (2017): 2016.0135, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0135.Robust evidence exists that certain extreme weather and climate events, especially daily temperature and precipitation extremes, have changed in regard to intensity and frequency over recent decades. These changes have been linked to human-induced climate change, while the degree to which climate change impacts an individual extreme climate event (ECE) is more difficult to quantify. Rapid progress in event attribution has recently been made through improved understanding of observed and simulated climate variability, methods for event attribution and advances in numerical modelling. Attribution for extreme temperature events is stronger compared with other event types, notably those related to the hydrological cycle. Recent advances in the understanding of ECEs, both in observations and their representation in state-of-the-art climate models, open new opportunities for assessing their effect on human and natural systems. Improved spatial resolution in global climate models and advances in statistical and dynamical downscaling now provide climatic information at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Together with the continued development of Earth System Models that simulate biogeochemical cycles and interactions with the biosphere at increasing complexity, these make it possible to develop a mechanistic understanding of how ECEs affect biological processes, ecosystem functioning and adaptation capabilities. Limitations in the observational network, both for physical climate system parameters and even more so for long-term ecological monitoring, have hampered progress in understanding bio-physical interactions across a range of scales. New opportunities for assessing how ECEs modulate ecosystem structure and functioning arise from better scientific understanding of ECEs coupled with technological advances in observing systems and instrumentation.Portions of this study were supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) Cooperative Agreement #DE-FC02-97ER62402, and the National Science Foundation

Role of Perturbing Ocean Initial Condition in Simulated Regional Sea Level Change

Multiple lines of observational evidence indicate that the global climate has been getting warmer since the early 20th century. This warmer climate has led to a global mean sea level rise of about 18 cm during the 20th century, and over 6 cm for the first 15 years of the 21st century. Regionally the sea level rise is not uniform due in large part to internal climate variability. To better serve the community, the uncertainties of predicting/projecting regional sea level changes associated with internal climate variability need to be quantified. Previous research on this topic has used single-model large ensembles with perturbed atmospheric initial conditions (ICs). Here we compare uncertainties associated with perturbing ICs in just the atmosphere and just the ocean using a state-of-the-art coupled climate model. We find that by perturbing the oceanic ICs, the uncertainties in regional sea level changes increase compared to those with perturbed atmospheric ICs. Thus, in order for us to better assess the full spectrum of the impacts of such internal climate variability on regional and global sea level rise, approaches that involve perturbing both atmospheric and oceanic initial conditions are necessary

Sensitivity of MJO to the CAPE lapse time in the NCAR CAM3

Weak and irregular boreal winter MJO in the NCAR CAM3 corresponds to very low CAPE background, which is caused by easy-to-occur and over-dominant deep convection indicating the deep convective scheme uses either too low CAPE threshold as triggering function or too large consumption rate of CAPE to close the scheme. Raising the CAPE threshold from default 70 J/kg to ten times large only enhances the CAPE background while fails to noticeably improve the wind mean state and the MJO. However, lengthening the CAPE lapse time from one to eight hours significantly improved the background in CAPE and winds, and salient features of the MJO. Variances, dominant periods and zonal wave numbers, power spectra and coherent propagating structure in winds and convection associated with MJO are ameliorated and comparable to the observations. Lengthening the CAPE lapse time to eight hours reduces dramatically the cloud base mass flux, which prevents effectively the deep convection from occurring prematurely. In this case, partitioning of deep to shallow convection in MJO active area is about 5:4.5 compared to over 9:0.5 in the control run. Latent heat is significantly enhanced below 600 hPa over the central Indian Ocean and the western Pacific. Such partitioning of deep and shallow convection is argued necessary for simulating realistic MJO features. Although the universal eight hours lies in the upper limit of that required by the quasi-equilibrium theory, a local CAPE lapse time for the parameterized cumulus convection will be more realistic

Probability of US Heat Waves Affected by a Subseasonal Planetary Wave Pattern

Heat waves are thought to result from subseasonal atmospheric variability. Atmospheric phenomena driven by tropical convection, such as the Asian monsoon, have been considered potential sources of predictability on subseasonal timescales. Mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics have been considered too chaotic to allow significant prediction skill of lead times beyond the typical 10-day range of weather forecasts. Here we use a 12,000-year integration of an atmospheric general circulation model to identify a pattern of subseasonal atmospheric variability that can help improve forecast skill for heat waves in the United States. We find that heat waves tend to be preceded by 15-20 days by a pattern of anomalous atmospheric planetary waves with a wavenumber of 5. This circulation pattern can arise as a result of internal atmospheric dynamics and is not necessarily linked to tropical heating.We conclude that some mid-latitude circulation anomalies that increase the probability of heat waves are predictable beyond the typical weather forecast range

A modulation of the mechanism of the semiannual oscillation in the Southern Hemisphere.

ABSTRACT The local pressure changes associated with the twice-annual contraction/intensification and expansion/weakening of the circumpolar trough of low pressure around Antarctica, termed the semiannual oscillation (SAO), was the dominant signal in the annual cycle at mid and high southern latitudes before 1979. The mechanism, as shown by Van Loon (1967), arises from different response to the surface heat budget over the polar continent and the midlatitude ocean. It has subsequently been shown that in most years since 1979 the SAO has weakened considerably. Evidence is presented here from surface temperature data, 500 mb temperatures from a station pair and zonal mean 500 mb temperatures from the NCAR/NCEP reanalyses to show that a warming trend since 1979 has not been evenly distributed through the year at each latitude. Thus an anomalous change in the temperature gradient between 50°S and 65°S, with peaks in roughly May and November, has modulated the mechanism that produces the SAO, with its peaks in March and September. Consequently, the magnitude of the SAO has decreased in the more recent period