scholarly journals Modulation of Marine Low Clouds Associated with the Tropical Intraseasonal Variability over the Eastern Pacific

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (14) ◽  
pp. 5560-5574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianan Jiang ◽  
Terence L. Kubar ◽  
Sun Wong ◽  
William S. Olson ◽  
Duane E. Waliser
Keyword(s):  
North Pacific ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Inversion Layer ◽  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Heat Fluxes ◽  
Eastern Pacific ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Low Clouds ◽  
Low Cloud

Abstract Owing to its profound influences on global energy balance, accurate representation of low cloud variability in climate models is an urgent need for future climate projection. In the present study, marine low cloud variability on intraseasonal time scales is characterized, with a particular focus over the Pacific basin during boreal summer and its association with the dominant mode of tropical intraseasonal variability (TISV) over the eastern Pacific (EPAC) intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Analyses indicate that, when anomalous TISV convection is enhanced over the elongated EPAC ITCZ, reduction of low cloud fraction (LCF) is evident over a vast area of the central North Pacific. Subsequently, when the enhanced TISV convection migrates to the northern part of the EPAC warm pool, a “comma shaped” pattern of reduced LCF prevails over the subtropical North Pacific, along with a pronounced reduction of LCF present over the southeast Pacific (SEPAC). Further analyses indicate that surface latent heat fluxes and boundary heights induced by anomalous low-level circulation through temperature advection and changes of total wind speed, as well as midlevel vertical velocity associated with the EPAC TISV, could be the most prominent factors in regulating the intraseasonal variability of LCF over the North Pacific. For the SEPAC, temperature anomalies at the top of the boundary inversion layer between 850 and 800 hPa play a critical role in the local LCF intraseasonal variations. Results presented in this study provide not only improved understanding of variability of marine low clouds and the underlying physics, but also a prominent benchmark in constraining and evaluating the representation of low clouds in climate models.

Eastern Pacific Intraseasonal Variability: A Predictability Perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (23) ◽  
pp. 8869-8883 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Neena ◽  
Xianan Jiang ◽  
Duane Waliser ◽  
June-Yi Lee ◽  
Bin Wang
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Coupled Model ◽  
Eastern Pacific ◽  
Prediction Skill ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Boreal Winter ◽  
Weather And Climate

Abstract The eastern Pacific (EPAC) warm pool is a region of strong intraseasonal variability (ISV) during boreal summer. While the EPAC ISV is known to have large-scale impacts that shape the weather and climate in the region (e.g., tropical cyclones and local monsoon), simulating the EPAC ISV is still a great challenge for present-day global weather and climate models. In the present study, the predictive skill and predictability of the EPAC ISV are explored in eight coupled model hindcasts from the Intraseasonal Variability Hindcast Experiment (ISVHE). Relative to the prediction skill for the boreal winter Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) in the ISVHE (~15–25 days), the skill for the EPAC ISV is considerably lower in most models, with an average skill around 10 days. On the other hand, while the MJO exhibits a predictability of 35–45 days, the predictability estimate for the EPAC ISV is 20–30 days. The prediction skill was found to be higher when the hindcasts were initialized from the convective phase of the EPAC ISV as opposed to the subsidence phase. Higher prediction skill was also found to be associated with active MJO initial conditions over the western Pacific (evident in four out of eight models), signaling the importance of exploring the dynamic link between the MJO and the EPAC ISV. The results illustrate the possibility and need for improving dynamical prediction systems to facilitate more accurate and longer-lead predictions of the EPAC ISV and associated weather and short-term climate variability.

scholarly journals Drivers of the Low-Cloud Response to Poleward Jet Shifts in the North Pacific in Observations and Models

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (19) ◽  
pp. 7925-7947 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Zelinka ◽  
Kevin M. Grise ◽  
Stephen A. Klein ◽  
Chen Zhou ◽  
Anthony M. DeAngelis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Surface Temperature ◽  
North Pacific ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Cloud Coverage ◽  
The North ◽  
Low Clouds ◽  
Temperature Advection ◽  
Low Cloud ◽  
The North Pacific ◽  
Cloud Response

The long-standing expectation that poleward shifts of the midlatitude jet under global warming will lead to poleward shifts of clouds and a positive radiative feedback on the climate system has been shown to be misguided by several recent studies. On interannual time scales, free-tropospheric clouds are observed to shift along with the jet, but low clouds increase across a broad expanse of the North Pacific Ocean basin, resulting in negligible changes in total cloud fraction and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Here it is shown that this low-cloud response is consistent across eight independent satellite-derived cloud products. Using multiple linear regression, it is demonstrated that the spatial pattern and magnitude of the low-cloud-coverage response is primarily driven by anomalous surface temperature advection. In the eastern North Pacific, anomalous cold advection by anomalous northerly surface winds enhances sensible and latent heat fluxes from the ocean into the boundary layer, resulting in large increases in low-cloud coverage. Local increases in low-level stability make a smaller contribution to this low-cloud increase. Despite closely capturing the observed response of large-scale meteorology to jet shifts, global climate models largely fail to capture the observed response of clouds and radiation to interannual jet shifts because they systematically underestimate how sensitive low clouds are to surface temperature advection, and to a lesser extent, low-level stability. More realistic model simulations of cloud–radiation–jet interactions require that parameterizations more accurately capture the sensitivity of low clouds to surface temperature advection.

Impact of the Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation on the Diurnal Cycle of Precipitation near and over the Island of Luzon

2020 ◽  
Vol 148 (5) ◽  
pp. 1805-1827
Author(s):  
Kyle Chudler ◽  
Weixin Xu ◽  
Steven A. Rutledge
Keyword(s):  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Intraseasonal Oscillation ◽  
Vertical Wind Shear ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Heat Fluxes ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Diurnal Variability ◽  
Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation ◽  
Precipitation Estimates ◽  
Monsoon Winds

Abstract During the boreal summer, satellite-based precipitation estimates indicate a distinct maximum in rainfall off the west coast of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Also occurring during the summer months is the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation (BSISO), a main driver of intraseasonal variability in the region. This study investigates the diurnal variability of convective intensity, morphology, and precipitation coverage offshore and over the island of Luzon. The results are then composited by BSISO activity. Results of this study indicate that offshore precipitation is markedly increased during active BSISO phases, when strong low-level southwesterly monsoon winds bring increased moisture and enhanced convergence upwind of the island’s high terrain. A key finding of this work is the existence of an afternoon maximum in convection over Luzon even during active BSISO phases, when solar heating and instability are apparently reduced due to enhanced cloud cover. This result is important, as previous studies have shown in other areas of the tropics afternoon convection over landmasses is a key component to offshore precipitation. Although offshore precipitation is maximized in the evening hours during active phases, results indicate that precipitation frequently occurs over the ocean around the clock (both as organized systems and isolated, shallow showers), possibly owing to an increase in sensible and latent heat fluxes, vertical wind shear, and convergence of the monsoon flow with land features.

Simulation of subtropical marine stratocumulus clouds in convection-resolving models

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Heim ◽  
Laureline Hentgen ◽  
Nikolina Ban ◽  
Christoph Schär
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Cover ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Inversion Layer ◽  
Heat Fluxes ◽  
Global Climate Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Limited Area ◽  
Stratocumulus Clouds ◽  
The Mean

<p>Even though the complexity and resolution of global climate models (GCMs) has increased over the last decades, the inter-model spread of equilibrium climate sensitivity has not narrowed. The representation of subtropical low-level clouds and their associated radiative feedbacks in climate models still poses a major challenge. A fundamental problem underlying the simulation of such clouds is their multiscale nature. On the one hand, current GCMs allow to capture the large-scale processes but are too coarse to represent the mesoscale and microscale dynamical processes governing their formation and dissipation. On the other hand, large eddy simulations (LES) resolving the micro scale are bound to small domains and thus lack a robust representation of the large-scale flow and the mesoscale organisation of the clouds. Convection-resolving models (CRMs) are an attractive compromise between the former two since they allow for simulations at much higher resolution than in conventional GCMs and on larger domains than in LES.</p><p>Here we analyse how CRMs simulate stratocumulus decks and investigate causes for inter-model differences. We consider a set of ten CRMs (nine GCMs that are run at convection-resolving resolution during a short time period as part of the pioneering DYAMOND initiative, and the limited area model COSMO run by ourselves) used to simulate stratocumulus clouds over the South-East Atlantic during a 40 day period. The simulations cover a range of horizontal grid spacings between 5 and 1 km.</p><p>We find pronounced differences in the mean cloud cover among the analysed CRMs. In comparison to observed radiation (CERES), most of them underestimate cloud cover, in particular the low-lying stratus decks close to the African coast. Nevertheless, the simulated mesoscale cloud organisation is realistic and similar in the set of CRMs, with few exceptions showing organisation on larger scales than in the other models. In general, the simulated cloud field appears to be more sensitive to the model choice than to the horizontal resolution.</p><p>Despite the differences in the cloud cover, most models capture the subtropical inversion and its spatial structure relatively well. Therefore, differences in the inversion strengths do not suffice to explain variability in the simulated cloud cover fraction between models. However, we find a relation between the mean height of the stratocumulus layer (or inversion layer) and its cloud cover fraction: Models with higher inversions tend to simulate a higher cloud cover fraction, bringing them closer to observations. Similarly, stronger vertical mixing within the boundary layer and enhanced surface latent heat fluxes appear to be related to higher cloud cover. Such relations may help to determine the physical processes responsible for the differences among CRMs in the simulated stratocumulus field.</p>

scholarly journals Simulation of the intraseasonal variability over the Eastern Pacific ITCZ in climate models

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 617-636 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianan Jiang ◽  
Duane E. Waliser ◽  
Daehyun Kim ◽  
Ming Zhao ◽  
Kenneth R. Sperber ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Models ◽  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Eastern Pacific

scholarly journals Monitoring and Predicting the Intraseasonal Variability of the East Asian–Western North Pacific Summer Monsoon

2013 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
pp. 1124-1138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hai Lin
Keyword(s):  
Summer Monsoon ◽  
North Pacific ◽  
Western North Pacific ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Intraseasonal Oscillation ◽  
Longwave Radiation ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Northward Propagation

Abstract In this study, a new index is defined to capture the prominent northward propagation of the intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) in boreal summer in the East Asian and western North Pacific (EAWNP) region. It is based on the first two modes of empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of the combined fields of daily anomalies of zonally averaged outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and 850-hPa zonal wind (U850) in the EAWNP region. These two EOFs are well separated from the rest of the modes, and their principal components (PCs) capture the intraseasonal variability. They are nearly in quadrature in both space and time and their combination reasonably well represents the northward propagation of the ISO. As no future information beyond the current date is required as in conventional time filtering, this ISO index can be used in real-time applications. This index is applied to the output of the 24-yr historical hindcast experiment using the Global Environmental Multiscale (GEM) model of Environment Canada to evaluate the forecast skill of the ISO of the EAWNP summer monsoon.

scholarly journals Constraints on Climate Sensitivity from Space-Based Measurements of Low-Cloud Reflection

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (16) ◽  
pp. 5821-5835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florent Brient ◽  
Tapio Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Climate Sensitivity ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Temporal Variations ◽  
Shortwave Radiation ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity ◽  
Tropical Oceans ◽  
Low Clouds ◽  
Low Cloud ◽  
Well Models

Abstract Physical uncertainties in global-warming projections are dominated by uncertainties about how the fraction of incoming shortwave radiation that clouds reflect will change as greenhouse gas concentrations rise. Differences in the shortwave reflection by low clouds over tropical oceans alone account for more than half of the variance of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) among climate models, which ranges from 2.1 to 4.7 K. Space-based measurements now provide an opportunity to assess how well models reproduce temporal variations of this shortwave reflection on seasonal to interannual time scales. Here such space-based measurements are used to show that shortwave reflection by low clouds over tropical oceans decreases robustly when the underlying surface warms, for example, by −(0.96 ± 0.22)% K−1 (90% confidence level) for deseasonalized variations. Additionally, the temporal covariance of low-cloud reflection with temperature in historical simulations with current climate models correlates strongly (r = −0.67) with the models’ ECS. Therefore, measurements of temporal low-cloud variations can be used to constrain ECS estimates based on climate models. An information-theoretic weighting of climate models by how well they reproduce the measured deseasonalized covariance of shortwave cloud reflection with temperature yields a most likely ECS estimate around 4.0 K; an ECS below 2.3 K becomes very unlikely (90% confidence).

Critical role of boreal summer North Pacific subtropical highs in ENSO transition

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1979-1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyung-Sook Yun ◽  
Kyung-Ja Ha ◽  
Sang-Wook Yeh ◽  
Bin Wang ◽  
Baoqiang Xiang
Keyword(s):  
North Pacific ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Subtropical Highs

scholarly journals An Evaluation Metric for Intraseasonal Variability and its Application to CMIP3 Twentieth-Century Simulations

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (13) ◽  
pp. 3497-3508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prince K. Xavier ◽  
Jean-Philippe Duvel ◽  
Pascale Braconnot ◽  
Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Models ◽  
Intraseasonal Variability ◽  
Coupled Model ◽  
Summer Monsoon Rainfall ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Phase 3 ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Intercomparison Project ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Evaluation Metric

Abstract The intraseasonal variability (ISV) is an intermittent phenomenon with variable perturbation patterns. To assess the robustness of the simulated ISV in climate models, it is thus interesting to consider the distribution of perturbation patterns rather than only one average pattern. To inspect this distribution, the authors first introduce a distance that measures the similarity between two patterns. The reproducibility (realism) of the simulated intraseasonal patterns is then defined as the distribution of distances between each pattern and the average simulated (observed) pattern. A good reproducibility is required to analyze the physical source of the simulated disturbances. The realism distribution is required to estimate the proportion of simulated events that have a perturbation pattern similar to observed patterns. The median value of this realism distribution is introduced as an ISV metric. The reproducibility and realism distributions are used to evaluate boreal summer ISV of precipitations over the Indian Ocean for 19 phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) models. The 19 models are classified in increasing ISV metric order. In agreement with previous studies, the four best ISV metrics are obtained for models having a convective closure totally or partly based on the moisture convergence. Models with high metric values (poorly realistic) tend to give (i) poorly reproducible intraseasonal patterns, (ii) rainfall perturbations poorly organized at large scales, (iii) small day-to-day variability with overly red temporal spectra, and (iv) less accurate summer monsoon rainfall distribution. This confirms that the ISV is an important link in the seamless system that connects weather and climate.

The Seasonality of submesoscale variability in the Antarctic Seasonal Ice Zone

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Giddy ◽  
Sarah Nicholson ◽  
Marcel Du Plessis ◽  
Andy Thompson ◽  
Sebastiaan Swart
Keyword(s):  
Sea Ice ◽  
Mixed Layer ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Heat Fluxes ◽  
Surface Boundary ◽  
Surface Boundary Layer ◽  
Antarctic Sea Ice ◽  
The Antarctic ◽  
Seasonal Ice Zone

<p>The ocean surface boundary layer in the Southern Ocean plays a critical role in heat and carbon exchange with the atmosphere. Submesoscale flows have been found to be important in setting mixed layer variability in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). However, sparsity in observations, particularly south of the ACC in the Antarctic Seasonal Ice Zone (SIZ) where the horizontal density structure of the mixed layer is influenced by sea ice melt/formation and mesoscale stirring, brings into question the ability of climate models to correctly resolve mixed layer variability. We present novel fine-scale observations of the activity of submesoscale variability in the ice-free Antarctic SIZ using three deployments of underwater gliders over an annual cycle. Salinity-dominated density fronts of O(1)km associated with strong horizontal buoyancy gradients are observed during all deployments. There is evidence that stratifying ageostrophic eddies, energised by salinity driven submesoscale fronts are active across seasons, with intermittent equivalent heat fluxes of the same order to, or greater than local atmospheric forcing. This study highlights the need to consider future changes of Antarctic sea-ice in respect to feedback mechanisms associated with salinity (sea-ice) driven submesoscale flows. </p>

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