| 1. |
- Arndt, D. S., et al.
(författare)
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State of the Climate in 2016
- 2017
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Ingår i: Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society - (BAMS). - 0003-0007 .- 1520-0477. ; 98:8, s. S1-S280
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 2016, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth's atmosphere-carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide-continued to increase and reach new record highs. The 3.5 +/- 0.1 ppm rise in global annual mean carbon dioxide from 2015 to 2016 was the largest annual increase observed in the 58-year measurement record. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth's surface surpassed 400 ppm (402.9 +/- 0.1 ppm) for the first time in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800000 years. One of the strongest El Nino events since at least 1950 dissipated in spring, and a weak La Nina evolved later in the year. Owing at least in part to the combination of El Nino conditions early in the year and a long-term upward trend, Earth's surface observed record warmth for a third consecutive year, albeit by a much slimmer margin than by which that record was set in 2015. Above Earth's surface, the annual lower troposphere temperature was record high according to all datasets analyzed, while the lower stratospheric temperature was record low according to most of the in situ and satellite datasets. Several countries, including Mexico and India, reported record high annual temperatures while many others observed near-record highs. A week-long heat wave at the end of April over the northern and eastern Indian peninsula, with temperatures surpassing 44 degrees C, contributed to a water crisis for 330 million people and to 300 fatalities. In the Arctic the 2016 land surface temperature was 2.0 degrees C above the 1981-2010 average, breaking the previous record of 2007, 2011, and 2015 by 0.8 degrees C, representing a 3.5 degrees C increase since the record began in 1900. The increasing temperatures have led to decreasing Arctic sea ice extent and thickness. On 24 March, the sea ice extent at the end of the growth season saw its lowest maximum in the 37-year satellite record, tying with 2015 at 7.2% below the 1981-2010 average. The September 2016 Arctic sea ice minimum extent tied with 2007 for the second lowest value on record, 33% lower than the 1981-2010 average. Arctic sea ice cover remains relatively young and thin, making it vulnerable to continued extensive melt. The mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has the capacity to contribute similar to 7 m to sea level rise, reached a record low value. The onset of its surface melt was the second earliest, after 2012, in the 37-year satellite record. Sea surface temperature was record high at the global scale, surpassing the previous record of 2015 by about 0.01 degrees C. The global sea surface temperature trend for the 21st century-to-date of +0.162 degrees C decade(-1) is much higher than the longer term 1950-2016 trend of +0.100 degrees C decade(-1). Global annual mean sea level also reached a new record high, marking the sixth consecutive year of increase. Global annual ocean heat content saw a slight drop compared to the record high in 2015. Alpine glacier retreat continued around the globe, and preliminary data indicate that 2016 is the 37th consecutive year of negative annual mass balance. Across the Northern Hemisphere, snow cover for each month from February to June was among its four least extensive in the 47-year satellite record. Continuing a pattern below the surface, record high temperatures at 20-m depth were measured at all permafrost observatories on the North Slope of Alaska and at the Canadian observatory on northernmost Ellesmere Island. In the Antarctic, record low monthly surface pressures were broken at many stations, with the southern annular mode setting record high index values in March and June. Monthly high surface pressure records for August and November were set at several stations. During this period, record low daily and monthly sea ice extents were observed, with the November mean sea ice extent more than 5 standard deviations below the 1981-2010 average. These record low sea ice values contrast sharply with the record high values observed during 2012-14. Over the region, springtime Antarctic stratospheric ozone depletion was less severe relative to the 1991-2006 average, but ozone levels were still low compared to pre-1990 levels. Closer to the equator, 93 named tropical storms were observed during 2016, above the 1981-2010 average of 82, but fewer than the 101 storms recorded in 2015. Three basins-the North Atlantic, and eastern and western North Pacific-experienced above-normal activity in 2016. The Australian basin recorded its least active season since the beginning of the satellite era in 1970. Overall, four tropical cyclones reached the Saffir-Simpson category 5 intensity level. The strong El Nino at the beginning of the year that transitioned to a weak La Nina contributed to enhanced precipitation variability around the world. Wet conditions were observed throughout the year across southern South America, causing repeated heavy flooding in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Wetter-than-usual conditions were also observed for eastern Europe and central Asia, alleviating the drought conditions of 2014 and 2015 in southern Russia. In the United States, California had its first wetter-than-average year since 2012, after being plagued by drought for several years. Even so, the area covered by drought in 2016 at the global scale was among the largest in the post-1950 record. For each month, at least 12% of land surfaces experienced severe drought conditions or worse, the longest such stretch in the record. In northeastern Brazil, drought conditions were observed for the fifth consecutive year, making this the longest drought on record in the region. Dry conditions were also observed in western Bolivia and Peru; it was Bolivia's worst drought in the past 25 years. In May, with abnormally warm and dry conditions already prevailing over western Canada for about a year, the human-induced Fort McMurray wildfire burned nearly 590000 hectares and became the costliest disaster in Canadian history, with $3 billion (U.S. dollars) in insured losses.
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| 2. |
- Arndt, D. S., et al.
(författare)
-
STATE OF THE CLIMATE IN 2017
- 2018
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Ingår i: Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society - (BAMS). - : American Meteorological Society. - 0003-0007 .- 1520-0477. ; 99:8, s. S1-S310
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)
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| 3. |
- Berg, Alexis, et al.
(författare)
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Interannual Coupling between Summertime Surface Temperature and Precipitation over Land: Processes and Implications for Climate Change
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Climate. - 1520-0442. ; 28:3, s. 1308-1328
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Widespread negative correlations between summertime-mean temperatures and precipitation over land regions are a well-known feature of terrestrial climate. This behavior has generally been interpreted in the context of soil moisture atmosphere coupling, with soil moisture deficits associated with reduced rainfall leading to enhanced surface sensible heating and higher surface temperature. The present study revisits the genesis of these negative temperature precipitation correlations using simulations from the Global Land Atmosphere Coupling Experiment phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (GLACE-CMIP5) multimodel experiment. The analyses are based on simulations with five climate models, which were integrated with prescribed (noninteractive) and with interactive soil moisture over the period 1950-2100. While the results presented here generally confirm the interpretation that negative correlations between seasonal temperature and precipitation arise through the direct control of soil moisture on surface heat flux partitioning, the presence of widespread negative correlations when soil moisture atmosphere interactions are artificially removed in at least two out of five models suggests that atmospheric processes, in addition to land surface processes, contribute to the observed negative temperature precipitation correlation. On longer time scales, the negative correlation between precipitation and temperature is shown to have implications for the projection of climate change impacts on near-surface climate: in all models, in the regions of strongest temperature precipitation anticorrelation on interannual time scales, long-term regional warming is modulated to a large extent by the regional response of precipitation to climate change, with precipitation increases (decreases) being associated with minimum (maximum) warming. This correspondence appears to arise largely as the result of soil moisture atmosphere interactions.
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| 4. |
- Berg, Alexis, et al.
(författare)
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Land-atmosphere feedbacks amplify aridity increase over land under global warming
- 2016
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Ingår i: Nature Climate Change. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1758-678X .- 1758-6798. ; 6:9, s. 869-874
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The response of the terrestrial water cycle to global warming is central to issues including water resources, agriculture and ecosystem health. Recent studies indicate that aridity, defined in terms of atmospheric supply (precipitation, P) and demand (potential evapotranspiration, E p) of water at the land surface, will increase globally in a warmer world. Recently proposed mechanisms for this response emphasize the driving role of oceanic warming and associated atmospheric processes. Here we show that the aridity response is substantially amplified by land-atmosphere feedbacks associated with the land surface's response to climate and CO 2 change. Using simulations from the Global Land Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE)-CMIP5 experiment, we show that global aridity is enhanced by the feedbacks of projected soil moisture decrease on land surface temperature, relative humidity and precipitation. The physiological impact of increasing atmospheric CO 2 on vegetation exerts a qualitatively similar control on aridity. We reconcile these findings with previously proposed mechanisms by showing that the moist enthalpy change over land is unaffected by the land hydrological response. Thus, although oceanic warming constrains the combined moisture and temperature changes over land, land hydrology modulates the partitioning of this enthalpy increase towards increased aridity.
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| 5. |
- May, Wilhelm, et al.
(författare)
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Contributions of soil moisture interactions to climate change in the tropics in the GLACE–CMIP5 experiment
- 2015
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Ingår i: Climate Dynamics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1432-0894 .- 0930-7575. ; 45:11-12, s. 3275-3297
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contributions of changes in soil moisture to the projected climate change in the tropics at the end of the twenty first century are quantified using the simulations from five different global climate models, which contributed to the GLACE–CMIP5 experiment. “GLACE” refers to the Global Land Atmosphere Coupling Experiment and “CMIP5” to the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. This is done by relating the overall projected changes in climate to those changes in climate that are related to the projected changes in soil moisture. The study focusses on two particular aspects of the interactions of the soil moisture with climate, the soil moisture–temperature coupling and the soil moisture–precipitation coupling. The simulations show distinct future changes in soil moisture content in the tropics, with a general tendency of increases in the central parts of the tropics and decreases in the subtropics. These changes are associated with corresponding changes in precipitation, with an overall tendency of an approximate 5 % change in soil moisture in response to a precipitation change of 1 mm/day. All five individual models are characterized by the same qualitative behaviour, despite differences in the strength and in the robustness of the coupling between soil moisture and precipitation. The changes in soil moisture content are found to give important contributions to the overall climate change in the tropics. This is in particularly the case for latent and sensible heat flux, for which about 80 % of the overall changes are related to soil moisture changes. Similarly, about 80 % of the overall near-surface temperature changes (with the mean temperature changes in the tropics removed) are associated with soil moisture changes. For precipitation, on the other hand, about 30–40 % of the overall change can be attributed to soil moisture changes. The robustness of the contributions of the soil moisture changes to the overall climate change varies between the different meteorological variables, with a high degree of robustness for the surface energy fluxes, a fair degree for near-surface temperature and a low degree for precipitation. Similar to the coupling between soil moisture and precipitation, the five individual models are characterized by the same qualitative behaviour, albeit differences in the strength and the robustness of the contributions of the soil moisture change. This suggests that despite the regional differences in the projected climate changes between the individual models, the basic physical mechanisms governing the soil moisture–temperature coupling and the soil moisture–precipitation coupling work similarly in these models. The experiment confirms the conceptual models of the soil moisture–temperature coupling and the soil moisture–precipitation coupling described Seneviratne et al. (Earth-Sci Rev 99:125–161, 2010). For the soil moisture–temperature coupling, decreases (increases) in soil moisture lead to increasing (decreasing) sensible heat fluxes and near-surface temperatures. The soil moisture–precipitation coupling is part of a positive feedback loop, where increases (decreases) in precipitation cause increases (decreases) in soil moisture content, which, in turn, lead to increasing (decreasing) latent heat fluxes and precipitation.
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| 6. |
- May, Wilhelm, et al.
(författare)
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Contributions of soil moisture interactions to future precipitation changes in the GLACE-CMIP5 experiment
- 2017
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Ingår i: Climate Dynamics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0930-7575 .- 1432-0894. ; 49:5-6, s. 1681-1704
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Changes in soil moisture are likely to contribute to future changes in latent heat flux and various characteristics of daily precipitation. Such contributions during the second half of the twenty-first century are assessed using the simulations from the GLACE-CMIP5 experiment, applying a linear regression analysis to determine the magnitude of these contributions. As characteristics of daily precipitation, mean daily precipitation, the frequency of wet days and the intensity of precipitation on wet days are considered. Also, the frequency and length of extended wet and dry spells are studied. Particular focus is on the regional (for nine selected regions) as well as seasonal variations in the magnitude of the contributions of the projected differences in soil moisture to the future changes in latent heat flux and in the characteristics of daily precipitation. The results reveal the overall tendency that the projected differences in soil moisture contribute to the future changes in response to the anthropogenic climate forcing for all the meteorological variables considered here. These contributions are stronger and more robust (i.e., there are smaller deviations between individual climate models) for the latent heat flux than for the characteristics of daily precipitation. It is also found that the contributions of the differences in soil moisture to the future changes are generally stronger and more robust for the frequency of wet days than for the intensity of daily precipitation. Consistent with the contributions of the projected differences in soil moisture to the future changes in the frequency of wet days, soil moisture generally contributes to the future changes in the characteristics of wet and dry spells. The magnitude of these contributions does not differ systematically between the frequency and the length of such extended spells, but the contributions are generally slightly stronger for dry spells than for wet spells. Distinguishing between the nine selected regions and between the different seasons, it is found that the strength of the contributions of the differences in soil moisture to the future changes in the various meteorological variables varies by region and, in particular, by season. Similarly, the robustness of these contributions varies between the regions and in the course of the year. The importance of soil moisture changes for the future changes in various aspects of daily precipitation and other aspects of the hydrological cycle illustrates the need for a comprehensive and realistic representation of land surface processes and of land surface conditions in climate models.
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