A Possible Constraint on Regional Precipitation Intensity Changes under Global Warming

Gutowski, William J.; Takle, Eugene S.; Kozak, Kari; Patton, Jason C.; Arritt, Raymond W.; Christensen, Jens Hesselbjerg

doi:10.1175/2007jhm817.1

Cited by 71 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The constraint found by Gutowski et al (2007) on how precipitation intensity versus frequency changes in North America under global warming was also found in simulations of global warming effects in Korea and Europe ).…”

Section: Extreme Precipitationsupporting

confidence: 53%

Scientific Final Report: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CONTINUOUS DYNAMIC GRID ADAPTATION IN A GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC MODEL: APPLICATION AND REFINEMENT

Gutowski¹,

Prusa²

2012

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThis project had goals of advancing the performance capabilities of the numerical general circulation model EULAG and using it to produce a fully operational atmospheric global climate model (AGCM) that can employ either static or dynamic grid stretching for targeted phenomena. The resulting AGCM combined EULAG's advanced dynamics core with the "physics" of the NCAR Community Atmospheric Model (CAM). Effort discussed below shows how we improved model performance and tested both EULAG and the coupled CAM-EULAG in several ways to demonstrate the grid stretching and ability to simulate very well a wide range of scales, that is, multi-scale capability. We leveraged our effort through interaction with an international EULAG community that has collectively developed new features and applications of EULAG, which we exploited for our own work summarized here. Overall, the work contributed to over 40 peerreviewed publications and over 70 conference/workshop/seminar presentations, many of them invited. 3a. EULAG AdvancesEULAG is a non-hydrostatic, parallel computational model for all-scale geophysical flows. EULAG's name derives from its two computational options: EULerian (flux form) or semi-LAGrangian (advective form). The model combines nonoscillatory forward-in-time (NFT) numerical algorithms with a robust elliptic Krylov solver. A signature feature of EULAG is that it is formulated in generalized timedependent curvilinear coordinates. In particular, this enables grid adaptivity. In total, these features give EULAG novel advantages over many existing dynamical cores.For EULAG itself, numerical advances included refining boundary conditions and filters for optimizing model performance in polar regions. We also added flexibility to the model's underlying formulation, allowing it to work with the pseudo-compressible

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Section: Extreme Precipitationsupporting

confidence: 53%

Scientific Final Report: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CONTINUOUS DYNAMIC GRID ADAPTATION IN A GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC MODEL: APPLICATION AND REFINEMENT

Gutowski¹,

Prusa²

2012

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“…precipitation in the climate projections, and nearly all low intensity precipitation contributes a reduced fraction (Gutowski et al, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How spatially coherent and statistically robust are temporal changes in extreme precipitation in the contiguous USA?

Pryor

Howe

Kunkel

2008

Intl Journal of Climatology

134

104

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Century-long precipitation records from stations in the contiguous USA indicate an increased frequency of rainy days over the past century and some evolution in the probability distributions of precipitation amount. Temporal trends in eight metrics of the precipitation climate are of similar magnitude and sign regardless of whether they are derived from bootstrapping of regression residuals or using the Kendall's tau statistic, though the bootstrap technique generally resolved a larger number of 'significant' trends. There is substantial variability in terms of the magnitude, significance and sign of the linear trends with specific metrics, and they are sensitive to recording bias of light precipitation events in the early part of the 20th century. The majority of stations that exhibit significant linear trends show evidence of increases in the intensity of events above the 95th percentile. The resolved trends tend to have a larger magnitude at the end of the century. Spatial variability as manifest in the spatial autocorrelation in the interannual variability and trends in extreme metrics is manifest at a range of scales, but in general the correlation between stations is significant only for separation of distances of a few tens of kilometres. The largest trends towards increased annual total precipitation, number of rainy days and intense precipitation (e.g. fraction of precipitation derived from events in excess of the 90th percentile value) are focussed on the Central Plains/northwestern Midwest.

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“…The model computed precipitation using the Grell [1993] convection parameterization and a simplified version [Giorgi and Shields, 1999] of the Hsie et al [1984] explicit moisture scheme. Pan et al [2001] and Gutowski et al [2007] provide further details of the model configuration.…”

Section: Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The difference is due to difficulties climate models have in simulating the intensity of extreme events as strongly as observed [e.g., Gutowski et al, 2003Gutowski et al, , 2007, which is at least partly a consequence of relatively coarse resolution versus the dynamics directly producing intense condensation. The scenario-simulation threshold increases by about the same amount (17%) over the control simulation as the climate change for average precipitation.…”

Section: Widespread Extreme Precipitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in extreme, cold‐season synoptic precipitation events under global warming

Gutowski

Willis

Patton

et al. 2008

Geophysical Research Letters

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[1] We analyze regional climate model (RCM) simulations of daily, spatially distributed extreme precipitation events, using co-operative network observations and output from 10-year RCM simulations of present and future-scenario climates. We examine an Upper Mississippi River Basin region during October -March for daily amounts that exceed the 99.95th percentile and that occur simultaneously at several observation sites or model grid points. For the observations and each simulation, nearly all such extreme regional events occur when a slow moving, cut-off-low system develops over the Rockies and Great Plains and steadily pumps moisture into the Upper Mississippi region from the Gulf of Mexico. The threshold for the extreme events increases in the future scenario by an amount similar to the increase in saturation specific humidity. The results suggest robust circulation behavior for such extremes in the face of climate change.

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A Possible Constraint on Regional Precipitation Intensity Changes under Global Warming

Cited by 71 publications

References 47 publications

Scientific Final Report: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CONTINUOUS DYNAMIC GRID ADAPTATION IN A GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC MODEL: APPLICATION AND REFINEMENT

Scientific Final Report: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CONTINUOUS DYNAMIC GRID ADAPTATION IN A GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC MODEL: APPLICATION AND REFINEMENT

How spatially coherent and statistically robust are temporal changes in extreme precipitation in the contiguous USA?

Changes in extreme, cold‐season synoptic precipitation events under global warming

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