| 1. |
- Murto, Sonja, 1992-
(author)
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On the atmospheric transport pathways of heat into the Arctic in winter and spring
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The atmospheric meridional energy transport is an important component in the global climate system, as it transports moisture and heat from the midlatitudes into the Arctic, balancing the regional energy loss to space. Narrow and intense injections of warm and moist air, so-called warm-air intrusions, have a large local imprint on the surface through various processes acting on different scales, such as cloud formation, turbulent fluxes and atmospheric large-scale circulation. Despite their infrequency, they substantially alter near-surface temperatures and surface energy fluxes, promote and advance sea-ice melt and delay ice growth, thereby influence the annual ice evolution in the Arctic. Changes in the atmospheric energy transport are suggested as one of the remote mechanisms behind Arctic amplification, i.e. the phenomenon that the Arctic is warming substantially faster than the global average. Climate models fail to capture the observed magnitude of the Arctic warming, indicating that the driving mechanisms are not well understood. To properly predict the changing Arctic climate, a better knowledge of the current processes and more in-situ observations supporting our understanding are needed. In this thesis, winter- and springtime atmospheric processes associated with these warm-air intrusions over Arctic sea ice are explored. Lagrangian backward trajectories are utilized to study airmass origin, pathways and transformation. Reanalysis data are used to describe the synoptic situation and key processes associated with identified intrusion events or regions of interest. Observations from the Arctic Expedition MOSAiC in mid-April 2020 are also analyzed.The role and the mechanisms behind the formation of atmospheric blocking associated with wintertime warm extreme events in the high Arctic are explored. We find that the majority of these events are preceded by blocking over Eurasia and that 60 % of air-parcels ending up in the upper-level blocks experience diabatic heating. Most of this heating is associated with cloud-processes ahead of midlatitude cyclones, indicating that the interplay between cyclones and blockings are important for meridional transport and resulting warm extremes.A new method for detecting Arctic extreme events based on coherent regions of positive anomalies in the surface energy budget (SEB) is presented. Life cycles and pathways of such wintertime events with Pacific or Atlantic origin are described. Variations in the anomalies are shown to be associated with variations in turbulent fluxes. These extremes are linked to warm-air intrusions, despite that, they differ from temperature extremes in the Arctic as local processes also can produce SEB anomalies.Expanding from winter to spring, these extreme SEB anomaly events are utilized to investigate the importance of atmospheric processes and airmass origin in controlling the spatiotemporal variability of Arctic melt onset dates. Surface temperature and satellite-based observations are used as melt indicators. Indicative for early melt onset dates are inflow from Pacific and high frequency of SEB events both at melt and three weeks prior to melt, whereas later melt dates are favored by continental airmass origin, a low frequency of SEB events at melt and clear-sky conditions until melt.
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| 2. |
- Hagman, Martin, 1973-
(author)
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Processes important for forecasting of clouds over snow
- 2020
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Swedish Armed Forces setup of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) has problems to forecast low clouds in stably stratified conditions when the ground is covered by snow. The aim of this thesis is to understand what causes this deficit. Simulations during January and February 2018 are here compared with observations from Sodankylä in northern Finland. It is revealed that neither type of planetary boundary layer parameterization chosen nor vertical or horizontal interpolation are responsible for the deficiency. Instead, our experiments show that, to first order, poor initialization of Stratocumulus (Sc) clouds from the host model, Atmospheric Model High Resolution (HRES), of the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) is the missing link. In situations when Sc clouds are missing in the IFS analysis, although they exist in reality, we use information from vertical soundings from Sodankylä. In the initialization process we used the fact that liquid potential temperature is constant in a well-mixed cloud. Initializing cloud water and cloud ice from IFS HRES and from soundings with different methods improves the model performance and the formation of very low artificial clouds at the first model level is prohibited.
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| 3. |
- Nilsson, Emma, et al.
(author)
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Exploring Cyclone Evolution with Hierarchical Features
- 2022
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In: 2022 IEEE WORKSHOP ON TOPOLOGICAL DATA ANALYSIS AND VISUALIZATION (TOPOINVIS 2022). - : IEEE. - 9781665493543 - 9781665493550 ; , s. 92-102
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The problem of tracking and visualizing cyclones is still an active area of climate research, since the nature of cyclones varies depending on geospatial location and temporal season, resulting in no clear mathematical definition. Thus, many cyclone tracking methods are tailored to specific datasets and therefore do not support general cyclone extraction across the globe. To address this challenge, we present a conceptual application for exploring cyclone evolution by organizing the extracted cyclone tracks into hierarchical groups. Our approach is based on extrema tracking, and the resulting tracks can be defined in a multi-scale structure by grouping the points based on a novel feature descriptor defined on the merge tree, so-called crown features. Consequently, multiple parameter settings can be visualized and explored in a level-of-detail approach, supporting experts to quickly gain insights on cyclonic formation and evolution. We describe a general cyclone exploration pipeline that consists of four modular building blocks: (1) an extrema tracking method, (2) multiple definitions of cyclones as groups of extrema, including crown features, (3) the correlation of cyclones based on the underlying tracking information, and (4) a hierarchical visualization of the resulting feature tracks and their spatial embedding, allowing exploration on a global and local scale. In order to be as flexible as possible, our pipeline allows for exchanging every module with different techniques, such as other tracking methods and cyclone definitions.
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