scholarly journals Drought Relief and Reversal over North America from 1500 to 2016

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-107
Author(s):  
M. C. A. Torbenson ◽  
D. W. Stahle ◽  
I. M. Howard ◽  
D. J. Burnette ◽  
D. Griffin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
North America ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Temporal Stability ◽  
Warm Season ◽  
Cool Season ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
The North ◽  
Drought Relief

Abstract Season-to-season persistence of soil moisture drought varies across North America. Such interseasonal autocorrelation can have modest skill in forecasting future conditions several months in advance. Because robust instrumental observations of precipitation span less than 100 years, the temporal stability of the relationship between seasonal moisture anomalies is uncertain. The North American Seasonal Precipitation Atlas (NASPA) is a gridded network of separately reconstructed cool-season (December–April) and warm-season (May–July) precipitation series and offers new insights on the intra-annual changes in drought for up to 2000 years. Here, the NASPA precipitation reconstructions are rescaled to represent the long-term soil moisture balance during the cool season and 3-month-long atmospheric moisture during the warm season. These rescaled seasonal reconstructions are then used to quantify the frequency, magnitude, and spatial extent of cool-season drought that was relieved or reversed during the following summer months. The adjusted seasonal reconstructions reproduce the general patterns of large-scale drought amelioration and termination in the instrumental record during the twentieth century and are used to estimate relief and reversals for the most skillfully reconstructed past 500 years. Subcontinental-to-continental-scale reversals of cool-season drought in the following warm season have been rare, but the reconstructions display periods prior to the instrumental data of increased reversal probabilities for the mid-Atlantic region and the U.S. Southwest. Drought relief at the continental scale may arise in part from macroscale ocean–atmosphere processes, whereas the smaller-scale regional reversals may reflect land surface feedbacks and stochastic variability.

scholarly journals Spatial variability and its scale dependency of observed and modeled soil moisture over different climate regions

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 1177-1188 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Li ◽  
M. Rodell
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Spatial Variability ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Warm Season ◽  
Scale Dependency ◽  
Convex Shape ◽  
Spatial Moments ◽  
Environmental Controls

Abstract. Past studies on soil moisture spatial variability have been mainly conducted at catchment scales where soil moisture is often sampled over a short time period; as a result, the observed soil moisture often exhibited smaller dynamic ranges, which prevented the complete revelation of soil moisture spatial variability as a function of mean soil moisture. In this study, spatial statistics (mean, spatial variability and skewness) of in situ soil moisture, modeled and satellite-retrieved soil moisture obtained in a warm season (198 days) were examined over three large climate regions in the US. The study found that spatial moments of in situ measurements strongly depend on climates, with distinct mean, spatial variability and skewness observed in each climate zone. In addition, an upward convex shape, which was revealed in several smaller scale studies, was observed for the relationship between spatial variability of in situ soil moisture and its spatial mean when statistics from dry, intermediate, and wet climates were combined. This upward convex shape was vaguely or partially observable in modeled and satellite-retrieved soil moisture estimates due to their smaller dynamic ranges. Despite different environmental controls on large-scale soil moisture spatial variability, the correlation between spatial variability and mean soil moisture remained similar to that observed at small scales, which is attributed to the boundedness of soil moisture. From the smaller support (effective area or volume represented by a measurement or estimate) to larger ones, soil moisture spatial variability decreased in each climate region. The scale dependency of spatial variability all followed the power law, but data with large supports showed stronger scale dependency than those with smaller supports. The scale dependency of soil moisture variability also varied with climates, which may be linked to the scale dependency of precipitation spatial variability. Influences of environmental controls on soil moisture spatial variability at large scales are discussed. The results of this study should be useful for diagnosing large scale soil moisture estimates and for improving the estimation of land surface processes.

scholarly journals Mechanisms of Seasonal Soil Moisture Drought Onset and Termination in the Southern Great Plains

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Seager ◽  
Jennifer Nakamura ◽  
Mingfang Ting
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Tropical Pacific ◽  
Moisture Change ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
Southern Great Plains ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Over Time

AbstractMechanisms of drought onset and termination are examined across North America with a focus on the southern Plains using data from land surface models and regional and global reanalyses for 1979–2017. Continental-scale analysis of covarying patterns reveals a tight coupling between soil moisture change over time and intervening precipitation anomalies. The southern Great Plains are a geographic center of patterns of hydrologic change. Drying is induced by atmospheric wave trains that span the Pacific and North America and place northerly flow anomalies above the southern Plains. In the southern Plains winter is least likely, and fall most likely, for drought onset and spring is least likely, and fall or summer most likely, for drought termination. Southern Plains soil moisture itself, which integrates precipitation over time, has a clear relationship to tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies with cold conditions favoring dry soils. Soil moisture change, however, though clearly driven by precipitation, has a weaker relation to SSTs and a strong relation to internal atmospheric variability. Little evidence is found of connection of drought onset and termination to driving by temperature anomalies. An analysis of particular drought onsets and terminations on the seasonal time scale reveals commonalities in terms of circulation and moisture transport anomalies over the southern Plains but a variety of ways in which these are connected into the large-scale atmosphere and ocean state. Some onsets are likely to be quite predictable due to forcing by cold tropical Pacific SSTs (e.g., fall 2010). Other onsets and all terminations are likely not predictable in terms of ocean conditions.

Cool- and Warm-Season Precipitation Reconstructions over Western New Mexico

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (13) ◽  
pp. 3729-3750 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Stahle ◽  
M. K. Cleaveland ◽  
H. D. Grissino-Mayer ◽  
R. D. Griffin ◽  
F. K. Fye ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Annual Ring ◽  
Warm Season ◽  
Atmospheric Dynamics ◽  
Precipitation Data ◽  
Cool Season ◽  
The North ◽  
Average Precipitation

Abstract Precipitation over the southwestern United States exhibits distinctive seasonality, and contrasting ocean–atmospheric dynamics are involved in the interannual variability of cool- and warm-season totals. Tree-ring chronologies based on annual-ring widths of conifers in the southwestern United States are well correlated with accumulated precipitation and have previously been used to reconstruct cool-season and annual precipitation totals. However, annual-ring-width chronologies cannot typically be used to derive a specific record of summer monsoon-season precipitation. Some southwestern conifers exhibit a clear anatomical transition from the earlywood and latewood components of the annual ring, and these exactly dated subannual ring components can be measured separately and used as unique proxies of cool- and warm-season precipitation and their associated large-scale ocean–atmospheric dynamics. Two 2139-yr-long reconstructions of cool- (November–May) and early-warm season (July) precipitation have been developed from ancient conifers and relict wood at El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico. Both reconstructions have been verified on independent precipitation data and reproduce the spatial correlation patterns detected in the large-scale SST and 500-mb height fields using instrumental precipitation data from New Mexico. Above-average precipitation in the cool-season reconstruction is related to El Niño conditions and to the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation. Above-average precipitation in July is related to the onset of the North American monsoon over New Mexico and with anomalies in the 500-mb height field favoring moisture advection into the Southwest from the North Pacific, the Gulf of California, and the Gulf of Mexico. Cool- and warm-season precipitation totals are not correlated on an interannual basis in the 74-yr instrumental or 2139-yr reconstructed records, but wet winter–spring extremes tend to be followed by dry conditions in July and very dry winters tend to be followed by wet Julys in the reconstructions. This antiphasing of extremes could arise from the hypothesized cool- to early-warm-season change in the sign of large-scale ocean–atmospheric forcing of southwestern precipitation, from the negative land surface feedback hypothesis in which winter–spring precipitation and snow cover reduce surface warming and delay the onset of the monsoon, or perhaps from an interaction of both large-scale and regional forcing. Episodes of simultaneous interseasonal drought (“perfect” interseasonal drought) persisted for a decade or more during the 1950s drought of the instrumental era and during the eighth- and sixteenth-century droughts, which appear to have been two of the most profound droughts over the Southwest in the past 1400 yr. Simultaneous interseasonal drought is doubly detrimental to dry-land crop yields and is estimated to have occurred during the mid-seventeenth-century famines of colonial New Mexico but was less frequent during the late-thirteenth-century Great Drought among the Anasazi, which was most severe during the cool season.

scholarly journals Climatic dipoles drive two principal modes of North American boreal bird irruption

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (21) ◽  
pp. E2795-E2802 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtenay Strong ◽  
Benjamin Zuckerberg ◽  
Julio L. Betancourt ◽  
Walter D. Koenig
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Seed Production ◽  
Warm Season ◽  
Bird Populations ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
The North ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Seed Eating ◽  
One Year ◽  
Seed Crops

Pine Siskins exemplify normally boreal seed-eating birds that can be sparse or absent across entire regions of North America in one year and then appear in large numbers the next. These dramatic avian “irruptions” are thought to stem from intermittent but broadly synchronous seed production (masting) in one year and meager seed crops in the next. A prevalent hypothesis is that widespread masting in the boreal forest at high latitudes is driven primarily by favorable climate during the two to three consecutive years required to initiate and mature seed crops in most conifers. Seed production is expensive for trees and is much reduced in the years following masting, driving boreal birds to search elsewhere for food and overwintering habitat. Despite this plausible logic, prior efforts to discover climate-irruption relationships have been inconclusive. Here, analysis of more than 2 million Pine Siskin observations from Project FeederWatch, a citizen science program, reveals two principal irruption modes (North-South and West-East), both of which are correlated with climate variability. The North-South irruption mode is, in part, influenced by winter harshness, but the predominant climate drivers of both modes manifest in the warm season as continental-scale pairs of oppositely signed precipitation and temperature anomalies (i.e., dipoles). The climate dipoles juxtapose favorable and unfavorable conditions for seed production and wintering habitat, motivating a push-pull paradigm to explain irruptions of Pine Siskins and possibly other boreal bird populations in North America.

scholarly journals Representation of Terrestrial Hydrology and Large-Scale Drought of the Continental United States from the North American Regional Reanalysis

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 856-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Sheffield ◽  
Ben Livneh ◽  
Eric F. Wood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
North American ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Vic Model ◽  
The North ◽  
North American Regional Reanalysis ◽  
Regional Reanalysis

Abstract The North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) is a state-of-the-art land–atmosphere reanalysis product that provides improved representation of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle compared to previous global reanalyses, having the potential to provide an enhanced picture of hydrologic extremes such as floods and droughts and their driving mechanisms. This is partly because of the novel assimilation of observed precipitation, state-of-the-art land surface scheme, and higher spatial resolution. NARR is evaluated in terms of the terrestrial water budget and its depiction of drought at monthly to annual time scales against two offline land surface model [Noah v2.7.1 and Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC)] simulations and observation-based runoff estimates over the continental United States for 1979–2003. An earlier version of the Noah model forms the land component of NARR and so the offline simulation provides an opportunity to diagnose NARR land surface variables independently of atmospheric feedbacks. The VIC model has been calibrated against measured streamflow and so provides a reasonable estimate of large-scale evapotranspiration. Despite similar precipitation, there are large differences in the partitioning of precipitation into evapotranspiration and runoff. Relative to VIC, NARR and Noah annual evapotranspiration is biased high by 28% and 24%, respectively, and the runoff ratios are 50% and 40% lower. This is confirmed by comparison with observation-based runoff estimates from 1130 small, relatively unmanaged basins across the continental United States. The overestimation of evapotranspiration by NARR is largely attributed to the evapotranspiration component of the Noah model, whereas other factors such as atmospheric forcings or biases induced by precipitation assimilation into NARR play only a minor role. A combination of differences in the parameterization of evapotranspiration and in particular low stomatal resistance values in NARR, the seasonality of vegetation characteristics, the near-surface radiation and meteorology, and the representation of soil moisture dynamics, including high infiltration rates and the relative coupling of soil moisture with baseflow in NARR, are responsible for the differences in the water budgets. Large-scale drought as quantified by soil moisture percentiles covaries closely over the continental United States between the three datasets, despite large differences in the seasonal water budgets. However, there are large regional differences, especially in the eastern United States where the VIC model shows higher variability in drought dynamics. This is mostly due to increased frequency of completely dry conditions in NARR that result from differences in soil depth, higher evapotranspiration, early snowmelt, and early peak runoff. In the western United States, differences in the precipitation forcing contribute to large discrepancies between NARR and Noah/VIC simulations in the representation of the early 2000s drought.

scholarly journals Circumglobal Response to Prescribed Soil Moisture over North America

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (14) ◽  
pp. 4525-4545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haiyan Teng ◽  
Grant Branstator ◽  
Ahmed B. Tawfik ◽  
Patrick Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
North America ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
North Pacific Ocean ◽  
Stationary Wave ◽  
High Impact ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Boreal Winter ◽  
Dry Land ◽  
The North

Abstract A series of idealized prescribed soil moisture experiments is performed with the atmosphere/land stand-alone configuration of the Community Earth System Model, version 1, in an effort to find sources of predictability for high-impact stationary wave anomalies observed in recent boreal summers. We arbitrarily prescribe soil water to have a zero value at selected domains in the continental United States and run 100-member ensembles to examine the monthly and seasonal mean response. Contrary to the lack of a substantial response in the boreal winter, the summertime circulation response is robust, consistent, and circumglobal. While the stationary wave response over the North America and North Atlantic sectors can be well explained by the reaction of a linear dynamical system to heating anomalies caused by the imposed dry land surface, nonlinear processes involving synoptic eddies play a crucial role in forming the remote response in Eurasia and the North Pacific Ocean. A number of other possible factors contributing to the circulation responses are also discussed. Overall, the experiments suggest that, in the boreal summer, soil moisture may contribute to the predictability of high-impact stationary wave events, which can impact regions that are great distances from these source regions.

scholarly journals Soil Moisture Initialization Error and Subgrid Variability of Precipitation in Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randal D. Koster ◽  
Gregory K. Walker ◽  
Sarith P. P. Mahanama ◽  
Rolf H. Reichle
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Forecast Skill ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Streamflow Forecast ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Streamflow Forecasts ◽  
Seasonal Streamflow ◽  
Soil Moisture Initialization

Abstract Offline simulations over the conterminous United States (CONUS) with a land surface model are used to address two issues relevant to the forecasting of large-scale seasonal streamflow: (i) the extent to which errors in soil moisture initialization degrade streamflow forecasts, and (ii) the extent to which a realistic increase in the spatial resolution of forecasted precipitation would improve streamflow forecasts. The addition of error to a soil moisture initialization field is found to lead to a nearly proportional reduction in large-scale seasonal streamflow forecast skill. The linearity of the response allows the determination of a lower bound for the increase in streamflow forecast skill achievable through improved soil moisture estimation, for example, through the assimilation of satellite-based soil moisture measurements. An increase in the resolution of precipitation is found to have an impact on large-scale seasonal streamflow forecasts only when evaporation variance is significant relative to precipitation variance. This condition is met only in the western half of the CONUS domain. Taken together, the two studies demonstrate the utility of a continental-scale land surface–modeling system as a tool for addressing the science of hydrological prediction.

Summer Rainfall Forecast Spread in an Ensemble Initialized with Different Soil Moisture Analyses

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric A. Aligo ◽  
William A. Gallus ◽  
Moti Segal
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Warm Season ◽  
Summer Rainfall ◽  
Rainfall Threshold ◽  
Rainfall Thresholds ◽  
Relative Operating Characteristic ◽  
The North ◽  
Forecasting System

Abstract The performance of an ensemble forecasting system initialized using varied soil moisture alone has been evaluated for rainfall forecasts of six warm season convective cases. Ten different soil moisture analyses were used as initial conditions in the ensemble, which used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Advanced Research WRF (ARW) model at 4-km horizontal grid spacing with explicit rainfall. Soil moisture analyses from the suite of National Weather Service operational models—the Rapid Update Cycle, the North American Model (formerly known as the Eta Model), and the Global Forecasting System—were used to design the 10-member ensemble. For added insight, two other runs with extremely low and high soil moistures were included in this study. Although the sensitivity of simulated 24-h rainfall to soil moisture was occasionally substantial in both weakly forced and strongly forced cases, a U-shaped rank histogram indicated insufficient spread in the 10-member ensemble. This result suggests that ensemble forecast systems using soil moisture perturbations alone might not add enough variability to rainfall forecasts. Perturbations to both atmospheric initial conditions and land surface initial conditions as well as perturbations to other aspects of model physics may increase forecast spread. Correspondence ratio values for the 0.01- and 0.5-in. rainfall thresholds imply some spread in the soil moisture ensemble, but mainly in the weakly forced cases. Relative operating characteristic curves for the 10-member ensemble and for various rainfall thresholds indicate modest skill for all thresholds with the most skill associated with the lowest rainfall threshold, a result typical of warm season events.

scholarly journals Investigating Land Surface Effects on the Moisture Transport over South America with a Moisture Tagging Model

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (19) ◽  
pp. 6627-6644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhao Yang ◽  
Francina Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
South America ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Moisture Transport ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
Thermal Structure ◽  
Northwestern Argentina ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Circulation Patterns

Abstract Land–atmosphere interactions are a critical component of precipitation processes within the Amazon basin and La Plata River basin (LPRB) in South America. Two of the possible pathways through which the land surface can affect precipitation are 1) by changing the amount of moisture available for precipitation (moisture recycling) and 2) by changing the atmospheric thermal structure and consequently affecting circulation patterns. In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with embedded water vapor tracers (WVT) is used to disentangle these relative contributions, with a particular focus on the precipitation of LPRB. Using WRF-WVT we track the moisture that originates from the Amazon basin over a 10-yr period. It is estimated that Amazon evapotranspiration (ET) contributes to around 30% of the total precipitation over the Amazon and around 16% over the LPRB. Focusing on large-scale circulation patterns that transport moisture into the LPRB, we show that land surface conditions in northwestern Argentina are critical for the meridional transport of moisture to higher latitudes via Chaco jet events (CJEs). Warm surface air temperature associated with dry soil moisture over northwestern Argentina is linked to enhanced CJE northerly low-level winds that intensify moisture transport by changing continental-scale circulation patterns. WRF sensitivity tests confirm that soil moisture variations over this region affect meridional moisture transport.

scholarly journals Using data assimilation to optimize pedotransfer functions using large-scale in-situ soil moisture observations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cooper ◽  
Eleanor Blyth ◽  
Hollie Cooper ◽  
Rich Ellis ◽  
Ewan Pinnington ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Data Assimilation ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Pedotransfer Functions ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Land Surface Models ◽  
Surface Models

Abstract. Soil moisture predictions from land surface models are important in hydrological, ecological and meteorological applications. In recent years the availability of wide-area soil-moisture measurements has increased, but few studies have combined model-based soil moisture predictions with in-situ observations beyond the point scale. Here we show that we can markedly improve soil moisture estimates from the JULES land surface model using field scale observations and data assimilation techniques. Rather than directly updating soil moisture estimates towards observed values, we optimize constants in the underlying pedotransfer functions, which relate soil texture to JULES soil physics parameters. In this way we generate a single set of newly calibrated pedotransfer functions based on observations from a number of UK sites with different soil textures. We demonstrate that calibrating a pedotransfer function in this way can improve the performance of land surface models, leading to the potential for better flood, drought and climate projections.

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