Phys.org October 14, 2024 Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are key agents in distributing extratropical precipitation and transporting moisture poleward. Climate models suggest an increase in AR activity in the extratropics over the past four decades. However, analyses indicate a poleward shift of ARs during boreal winter in both hemispheres. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara demonstrated that low-frequency sea surface temperature variability in the tropical eastern Pacific exhibited a cooling tendency since 2000 that played a key role in driving global AR shift, mostly over extratropical oceans. This mechanism also operated on interannual timescales, controlled by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and was […]
Tag Archives: Atmospheric rivers
The escalating impact of global warming on atmospheric rivers
Phys.org February 13, 2024 Researchers in Hong Kong assessed the performance of atmospheric rivers (ARs) in Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) models on both seasonal and interannual timescales within the historical period and investigated the future projection of ARs under different emission scenarios on a global scale. The multi-model mean results obtained using the PanLu detection algorithm consistently exhibited agreement with the observational AR climatology and captured interannual fluctuations as well as the relationships with large-scale drivers. The future projections revealed increased AR frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent and decreased landfall intervals with regional variations […]
Atmospheric river storms create $1 billion-a-year flood damage
Science Daily December 4, 2019 Researchers found that flooding has caused nearly $51 billion in damages to western states in the last 40 years. More than 84 percent of these damages were caused by atmospheric rivers (ARs), long narrow corridors of water vapor in the atmosphere, capable of carrying more than twice the volume of the Amazon river through the sky. A team of researchers in the US (UC San Diego, US Army) used 40 years of data from the National Flood Insurance Program to show that ARs are the primary drivers of flood damages in the western United States. […]