Abstract
Extreme rainfall over Southwestern United States/Northwestern Mexico (SWUNWM) has been mostly investigated during wet seasons, while no or little attention has been paid to extreme rainfall during dry seasons despite its vital importance for sustaining vegetation and ecosystems. Here we examine the top 1% rainfall over SWUNWM in June, the driest month on average, and assess how it is affected by the ocean with a 50 km-resolution global climate model. Comparing millennia-long simulations with and without the ocean, we find that the ocean does not change the pattern and magnitude of atmospheric circulation associated with June extreme rainfall, but significantly enhances rainfall intensity. This intensification is attributed to a larger variability of atmospheric moisture content enhanced mainly by the sea surface temperature (SST) in the tropical Pacific. The similarities in the atmospheric circulation associated with, and the temporal characteristics of, June extreme rainfall between the two simulations point to a dominant control of extreme rainfall dynamics by atmospheric intrinsic processes and atmosphere-land coupling. These modeling results imply that the predictability of occurrence of June extreme rainfall over SWUNWM is limited by atmospheric intrinsic dynamics and atmosphere-land coupling, while reliable predictions of its intensity likely require a faithful simulation of SST variability, especially in the tropical Pacific.
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Notes
Although the flux adjustment in FLOR is derived under present-day conditions, preindustrial radiative forcing is nearly in balance at top of the atmosphere and thus more suitable for millennium-long steady state simulations as done here. In addition, the difference in SST climatology between preindustrial and present-day levels is much weaker compared to the SST biases in the standard FLOR without flux adjustment. Therefore, the flux adjustment derived under present-day conditions still reduces the climatology biases in FLOR under preindustrial forcing.
ARs here refer to the atmospheric processes that resemble the typical wintertime ARs, which are characterized by an elongated narrow band of enhanced CWV and the associated low-level moisture transport along and within the band. The quantitative thresholds used in literature to identify wintertime ARs (e.g., 2 cm CWV in Ralph et al. 2004, 2006) are not used here because (1) they are based on total (climatology + anomaly) fields while here anomalous fields are used (2) climatologies are quite different between summer and winter, especially for CWV. Nonetheless, the characteristics of wintertime ARs are clear in the anomalous CWV and low-level (10 m, 850 mb, and 500 mb) moisture transport for FLOR 0999 and AM2.5 0230 and 0283.
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Acknowledgements
H. Zhang conducted the experiments at Princeton University while being supported under block funding from NOAA/GFDL, and carried out the analysis at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University while being supported by NSF award OCE-16-57209 and NSF award AGS-19-34363. H. Zhang is grateful for Tom Delworth’s continuous support after his postdoctoral training at GFDL. H. Zhang is especially grateful for Richard Seager’s generous support on developing his personal research interests, as exemplified by this work. Comments from Richard Seager, Tom Delworth and two anonymous reviewers greatly improve the manuscript. GPCC and CPC US Unified Precipitation data are provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. All modeling data used here are archived on Lamont data server and access will be available upon request.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 and Table 1.
Correlation of monthly surface temperature with monthly precipitation averaged over southwestern North America (19–40°N, 125–96°W, indicated by a red box in each panel) as a function of calendar months in FLOR. Gray stippling denotes that the correlation is not significant at 5% level (based on a two-sided student t test)
Daily time series of selected June rainfall over SWUNWM in the NCEP-DOE reanalysis II product. The product is on a global T62 Gaussian grid. Plotted here are the five strongest years (see title in each panel) based on the total June rainfall amount (labeled in each panel) during 1979–2019. Note that these events represent the top 12.5% (5/40) events during the reanalysis period and are selected somewhat randomly since the 1% criterion from the model is not applicable in the reanalysis owing to its small number of samples
Evolution of the rainfall event peaked on June 2, 1999 (Day 0) in the NCEP-DOE reanalysis shown in Fig. 14. Shading indicates CWV anomalies (kg/m2), contours show 500 mb geopotential height anomalies (± 10 m, ± 30 m, ± 50 m, … positive solid and negative dashed) and arrows denote 500 mb wind anomalies with a scale vector of 10 m/s in the upper right corner. The SWUNWM area is indicated in each panel by a black box. This rainfall event appears to be associated with an AR propagating from southwest of the SWUNWM area. The AR is located at the southern flank of the anomalous cyclone (centered around 125 W, 35 N on Day − 3) and features a narrow band of anomalous positive CWV and southwesterly winds
FLOR to AM2.5 ratio of June CWV climatology (shading) and the FLOR CWV climatology (gray contours, in kg/m2). The ratio ranges from 0.93 to 1.07. Note that the color range is chosen to highlight the similarity between FLOR and AM2.5 in their CWV climatology
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Zhang, H. Tropical Pacific intensifies June extreme rainfall over Southwestern United States/Northwestern Mexico. Clim Dyn 55, 721–737 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05291-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05291-6