scholarly journals Atmospheric circulation over Europe during the Younger Dryas

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (50) ◽  
pp. eaba4844
Author(s):  
Brice R. Rea ◽  
Ramón Pellitero ◽  
Matteo Spagnolo ◽  
Philip Hughes ◽  
Susan Ivy-Ochs ◽  
...  

The Younger Dryas (YD) was a period of rapid climate cooling that occurred at the end of the last glaciation. Here, we present the first palaeoglacier-derived reconstruction of YD precipitation across Europe, determined from 122 reconstructed glaciers and proxy atmospheric temperatures. Positive precipitation anomalies (YD versus modern) are found along much of the western seaboard of Europe and across the Mediterranean. Negative precipitation anomalies occur over the Fennoscandian ice sheet, the North European Plain, and as far south as the Alps. This is consistent with a more southerly and zonal storm track, which is linked to a concomitant southern location of the Polar Frontal Jet Stream, generating cold air outbreaks and enhanced cyclogenesis, especially over the eastern Mediterranean. This atmospheric configuration resembles the modern Scandinavian (SCAND) circulation over Europe (a blocking high pressure over Scandinavia pushing storm tracks south and east), and by analogy, a seasonally varying palaeoprecipitation pattern is interpreted.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zakieh Alizadeh ◽  
Alireza Mohebalhojeh ◽  
Farhang Ahmadi-Givi ◽  
Mohammad Mirzaei ◽  
Sakineh Khansalari

<p>In recent history, the eastern Mediterranean and Saudi Arabia have experienced extreme precipitation events involving significant financial and human losses. An important subset of these events is associated with the activation of the Red Sea trough (RST). In this study, the effect and role of Rossby wave propagation during three cases (Dec 1993, Jan 2011 and May 1982) of the active RST is investigated. Meanwhile, the synoptic and dynamic factors related to the tropical-extratropical interaction and the lower and upper levels of troposphere are discussed for each event. The data used were extracted from the Era-Interim subsection of the ECMWF database with a time step of 6 hours and a spatial step of 80 km in both latitude and longitude directions.</p><p>Despite differences in humidity sources and the amount of hot and humid air ascent in each event, a general pattern can be deduced in all three events. The results show that in all events from a few days before the maximum rainfall, fluxes of heat and humidity are directed to Saudi Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean and the RST is strengthened and extended to the east of the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, a trough with varying intensity at the level of 500 hPa in the eastern Mediterranean exerts a southward influence, which is caused by the anticyclonic Rossby wave breaking. At the upper levels, associated with the wave activity flux divergence and convergence areas of the Mediterranean storm track, higher amounts of Rossby wave activity enter the northeast region of Africa. Also the meridional convergence of the wave activity flux strengthens the meridional circulation in the north of the Red Sea. Increased horizontal wave activity flux to the northeast Africa and the Red Sea is led to increased head and humidity flux to the region. On the other hand, the weakening of the extension of the Azores high pressure over Africa facilitates the tropical and extratropical interactions over the region. Also in the north or northeast of the Red Sea, a surface low pressure is formed. Having a different source in each case, the mid-level troughs exhibit a northwest-southeast title with respect to the surface lows which lead to baroclinic development and intensification of precipitation events in the eastern Mediterranean and Saudi Arabia.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Extreme precipitation, Rossby wave activity flux, Mediterranean storm track, upper level trough, meridional circulation, baroclinic development</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Albern ◽  
Aiko Voigt ◽  
Joaquim G. Pinto

<p>During boreal winter (December to February, DJF), the North Atlantic jet stream and storm track are expected to extend eastward over Europe in response to climate change. This will affect future weather and climate over Europe, for example by steering storms which are associated with strong winds and heavy precipitation towards Europe. The jet stream and storm track responses over Europe are robust across coupled climate models of phases 3, 5, and 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP; Harvey et al., 2020, JGR-A, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD032701). We show that the jet stream response is further robust across CMIP5 models of varying complexity ranging from coupled climate models to atmosphere-only General Circulation Models (GCMs) with prescribed sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea-ice cover. In contrast to the jet stream response over Europe, the jet stream response over the North Atlantic is not robust in the coupled climate models and the atmosphere-only GCMs.</p><p>In addition to the CMIP5 simulations, we investigate Amip-like simulations with the atmospheric components of ICON-NWP, and the CMIP5 models MPI-ESM-LR and IPSL-CM5A-LR that apply the cloud-locking method to break the cloud-radiation-circulation coupling and to diagnose the contribution of cloud-radiative changes on the jet stream response to climate change. In the simulations, SSTs are prescribed to isolate the impact of cloud-radiative changes via the atmospheric pathway, i.e., via changes in atmospheric cloud-radiative heating, and global warming is mimicked by a uniform 4K SST increase (cf. Albern et al., 2019, JAMES, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001592 and Voigt et al., 2019, J. Climate, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0810.1). In all three models, cloud-radiative changes contribute significantly and robustly to the eastward extension of the North Atlantic jet stream towards Europe. At the same time, cloud-radiative changes contribute to the model uncertainty over the North Atlantic. In addition to the jet stream response, we investigate the impact of cloud-radiative changes on the storm track response in ICON-NWP and discuss similarities and differences between the jet stream and storm track responses over the North Atlantic-European region.</p><p>In ICON-NWP, the impact of cloud-radiative changes on the jet stream response is dominated by tropical cloud-radiative changes while midlatitude and polar cloud-radiative changes have a minor impact. A further division of the tropics into four smaller tropical regions that cover the western tropical Pacific, the eastern tropical Pacific, the tropical Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean shows that cloud-radiative changes over the western tropical Pacific, eastern tropical Pacific, and Indian Ocean all contribute about equally to the eastward extension of the North Atlantic jet stream towards Europe because these regions exhibit substantial upper-tropospheric cloud-radiative heating in response to climate change. At the same time, cloud-radiative changes over the tropical Atlantic hardly contribute to the jet response over Europe because changes in atmospheric cloud-radiative heating under climate change are small in this region. As for the impact of global cloud-radiative changes, we also discuss the impact of the regional cloud-radiative changes on the storm track response over the North Atlantic-European region to climate change.</p>


Author(s):  
Estefania Montoya Duque ◽  
Frank Lunkeit ◽  
Richard Blender

AbstractIn this study, we analyse the influence of North Atlantic midwinter storm track suppressions on European synoptic temperature and precipitation anomalies to determine the large-scale conditions relevant for the so-called Christmas thaw. We diagnose this relation in daily ERA5 reanalysis data in the spatial resolution of 0.25∘ between 1979 and 2018. To access synoptic time scales, a 3–10-day band-pass filter is applied. An index for the suppression is defined by the upper tropospheric Eddy Kinetic Energy (EKE) anomalies in the North Atlantic. We define the strong jet stream years as the year exceeding the 75% of the winter seasonal values at 250 hPa. In winters with strong jet activity, the storm track suppression is found, in agreement with the barotropic governor mechanism. Composites of European surface temperature and precipitation for low index values reveal weakly warmer conditions during winter (DJF) in Central Europe and the British Isles and a distinct cooling in Northern Europe. In the 1-month interval during December 15 to January 15, the warming is more pronounced. The clearest signal is the precipitation increase with a magnitude of 1 mm/day in the Mediterranean region.


2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Becker ◽  
Julien Seguinot ◽  
Guillaume Jouvet ◽  
Martin Funk

Abstract. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), glaciers in the Alps reached a maximum extent, and broad sections of the foreland were covered by ice. In this study, we simulated the alpine ice cap using a glacier flow model to constrain the prevailing precipitation pattern with a geomorphological reconstruction of ice extent. For this purpose we forced the model using different temperature cooling and precipitation reduction factors. The use of the present-day precipitation pattern led to a systematic overestimation of the ice cover on the northern part of the Alps relative to the southern part. To reproduce the LGM ice cap, a more severe decrease in precipitation in the north than in the south was required. This result supports a southwesterly advection of atmospheric moisture to the Alps, sustained by a southward shift of the North Atlantic storm track during the LGM.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (14) ◽  
pp. 5242-5259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra M. Penny ◽  
David S. Battisti ◽  
Gerard H. Roe

Abstract This paper examines how variations in two mechanisms, upstream seeding and jet-core strength, relate to storminess within the cold season (October–April) Pacific storm track. It is found that about 17% of observed storminess covaries with the strength of the upstream wave source, and the relationship is robust throughout the cold season and for both the Pacific and Atlantic basins. Further analyses of the intraseasonal variability in the strength and structure of the wintertime [December–February (DJF)] Pacific jet stream draw upon both Eulerian-variance and feature-tracking statistics to diagnose why winter months with a strong-core jet stream have weaker storminess than those with a weak-core jet stream. Contrary to expectations, it is shown that the basic spatial patterns actually conform to a simple linear picture: regions with a weaker jet have weaker storminess. The overall decrease in storminess is most strongly linked to the weaker amplitude of individual storms in strong-core months. Previously proposed mechanisms are evaluated in the context of these new results. Last, this analysis provides further evidence that the midwinter suppression in storminess over the North Pacific Ocean is primarily due to a notable lack of storminess upstream of the Pacific storm track in the heart of winter.


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-272
Author(s):  
Onat Başbay ◽  
Mudar Salimeh ◽  
Eddie John

We review the continuing and extensive spread of Papilio demoleus in south-eastern Turkey and in regions of Turkey and Syria adjacent to the north-eastern Mediterranean. Since the authors documented the arrival of this attractive but potentially destructive papilionid species at coastal areas of Syria in 2019, regular monitoring has confirmed successful overwintering there, as well as in Turkey. As previously indicated, P. demoleus is widely recognized as an invasive pest species in Citrus-growing areas of the world and hence its arrival is of potential economic importance to a region in which citrus is widely grown.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Andrea Di Capua ◽  
Federica Barilaro ◽  
Gianluca Groppelli

This work critically reviews the Eocene–Oligocene source-to-sink systems accumulating volcanogenic sequences in the basins around the Alps. Through the years, these volcanogenic sequences have been correlated to the plutonic bodies along the Periadriatic Fault System, the main tectonic lineament running from West to East within the axis of the belt. Starting from the large amounts of data present in literature, for the first time we present an integrated 4D model on the evolution of the sediment pathways that once connected the magmatic sources to the basins. The magmatic systems started to develop during the Eocene in the Alps, supplying detritus to the Adriatic Foredeep. The progradation of volcanogenic sequences in the Northern Alpine Foreland Basin is subsequent and probably was favoured by the migration of the magmatic systems to the North and to the West. At around 30 Ma, the Northern Apennine Foredeep also was fed by large volcanogenic inputs, but the palinspastic reconstruction of the Adriatic Foredeep, together with stratigraphic and petrographic data, allows us to safely exclude the Alps as volcanogenic sources. Beyond the regional case, this review underlines the importance of a solid stratigraphic approach in the reconstruction of the source-to-sink system evolution of any basin.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (13) ◽  
pp. 4965-4981 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Booth ◽  
Young-Oh Kwon ◽  
Stanley Ko ◽  
R. Justin Small ◽  
Rym Msadek

To improve the understanding of storm tracks and western boundary current (WBC) interactions, surface storm tracks in 12 CMIP5 models are examined against ERA-Interim. All models capture an equatorward displacement toward the WBCs in the locations of the surface storm tracks’ maxima relative to those at 850 hPa. An estimated storm-track metric is developed to analyze the location of the surface storm track. It shows that the equatorward shift is influenced by both the lower-tropospheric instability and the baroclinicity. Basin-scale spatial correlations between models and ERA-Interim for the storm tracks, near-surface stability, SST gradient, and baroclinicity are calculated to test the ability of the GCMs’ match reanalysis. An intermodel comparison of the spatial correlations suggests that differences (relative to ERA-Interim) in the position of the storm track aloft have the strongest influence on differences in the surface storm-track position. However, in the North Atlantic, biases in the surface storm track north of the Gulf Stream are related to biases in the SST. An analysis of the strength of the storm tracks shows that most models generate a weaker storm track at the surface than 850 hPa, consistent with observations, although some outliers are found. A linear relationship exists among the models between storm-track amplitudes at 500 and 850 hPa, but not between 850 hPa and the surface. In total, the work reveals a dual role in forcing the surface storm track from aloft and from the ocean surface in CMIP5 models, with the atmosphere having the larger relative influence.


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