Can we extrapolate climate in an inner basin? The case of the Red Sea
Section snippets
The basic question
The ever increasing measurement capabilities, particularly from space, coupled with the high quality of the present meteorological models, provide a solid background of the Earth present climate. For instance, global meteorological models, together with various satellite observations, produce a fairly accurate distribution of different weather parameters such as temperature, wind speed, ocean surface waves, etc., in the form of both analyses and short-to-medium range forecasts. For the details
The area of interest
A thorough description of the Red Sea wind and wave characteristics is provided by (Langodan et al., 2014, Langodan et al., 2015, Langodan et al., 2018, henceforth L14, L15 and L18 respectively) out of which we summarize here the information relevant for the present study.
The Red Sea (see Fig. 1) is a slightly more than 2000 km long basin, located between Africa and Asia, extending in a rather straight North-North-West to South-South-East direction (NNW to SSE; henceforth the four cardinal
The available information
Our basic information is the extensive hindcast of the wind and wave conditions described in L18. This hindcast is possibly the best information presently available for the Red Sea. Starting from ERA-I as initial and boundary information, a two-step nested domain, respectively at 30 and 10 km resolution, has been used for daily 36 h runs using an assimilative Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model (Skamarock et al., 2008). The first 12 h were considered as spin-up, and the remaining 24 h
What we can say about the future of the Red Sea
The data and trends outlined in the previous section suggest a clear decrease in the number and intensity of the events entering the Red Sea from the Mediterranean since 1979. A milder decrease of the stronger events is present in the S to N systems associated with the NW monsoon in the Arabian Sea, and only minor changes are seen in the Tokar Gap wind. The question is what can we project for the relatively near future, say order of 20–40 years?
The natural thing would be to extrapolate the
General Discussion
The general question we started from is how feasible is to forecast the wind and wave climate in an inner basin for the forthcoming few decades. We purposely focused on the inner seas because their climate is often strongly linked to their geography, and as such, potentially dependent at a critical level on details of the general pattern. This often makes their forecast much more challenging and uncertain than the deriving global fields. As an example, we have investigated the Red Sea, a long
Data availability
The regional reanalysis used in this study could be requested from the corresponding author. All climate indices including Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) are retrieved from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) climate data guide (https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/). The global reanalysis ERA-Interim and ERA-20c are retrieved from ECMWF archives.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the virtual Red Sea Initiative (Grant # REP/1/3268-01-01). Sabique Langodan was supported by the General Commission of Survey (GCS), under Project RGC/3/1612-01-01 made by Office of Sponsored research (ORS)/KAUST, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Luigi. Cavaleri worked on this subject during a visit to KAUST. He was also supported by the EU contract 730030 (H2020-EO-2016, “CEASELESS”). Jesús Portilla
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