Temperature variability and soil–atmosphere interaction in South America simulated by two regional climate models

Menéndez, Claudio G.; Giles, Julián Alberto; Ruscica, Romina; Zaninelli, Pablo G.; Coronato, Tanea; Falco, Magdalena; Sörensson, Anna A.; Fita, L.; Carril, Andrea F.; Li, Laurent

doi:10.1007/s00382-019-04668-6

Cited by 23 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Since the atmosphere cannot store unlimited water, precipitation also increases downstream from the spurious source of evapotranspiration (Berg et al ., 2014; Wei and Dirmeyer, 2019). The evaporative fraction is higher in UNC than in CTL in much of southeastern and eastern South America, including Paraguay, southern Bolivia and eastern Brazil (see Menéndez et al ., 2019, fig. 4e who analysed temperature variability using the same set of RCA4 experiments), indicating that the percentage of available energy that is destined for evaporation increases in UNC.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ERA5 has a finer spatial and temporal resolution and a better global balance of precipitation and evaporation than ERA‐Interim, among other improvements (Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2017). The version of RCA4 considered in this study is currently used within CORDEX (http://www.cordex.org) and has been used over South America in previous studies (Spennemann et al ., 2018; Falco et al ., 2019; Giles et al ., 2019; Menéndez et al ., 2019; Zaninelli et al ., 2019), to which the reader can refer for more information about the model's configuration and performance. The spatial resolution is 25 and 50 km for ERA5 and RCA4, respectively.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This pair of simulations was also analysed in Menéndez et al . (2019) in the context of surface air temperature variability and the reader can refer to that study for more information regarding the experiment setup and the characteristics of the soil–atmosphere coupling.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the SALLJ exit region is located within the La Plata Basin, where continental moisture recycling highly contributes to local precipitation (van der Ent et al ., 2010; Martinez and Dominguez, 2014; Zemp et al ., 2014) and is also known as a hotspot of land–atmosphere coupling, where surface fluxes depend on soil moisture conditions. Some land–atmosphere interaction studies have been carried out at the inter‐annual and intra‐seasonal time scale in this region (Ruscica et al ., 2014; 2015; 2016; Spennemann et al ., 2018; Menéndez et al ., 2019); however, many land–atmosphere processes are still poorly understood, mainly at the diurnal scale and especially how they influence precipitation. In general, global and regional studies have found that the coupling seems to favour afternoon precipitation preferably over strong soil moisture gradients (Taylor et al ., 2011; Petrova et al ., 2018), but its magnitude and the signal of the feedbacks can change depending on the background wind (Froidevaux et al ., 2014; Ford et al ., 2015; Holgate et al ., 2019) and the moisture flux convergence (Petrova et al ., 2018; Welty and Zeng, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Warm‐season precipitation drivers in northeastern Argentina: Diurnal cycle of the atmospheric moisture balance and land–atmosphere coupling

Giles

Ruscica

Menéndez

2020

Intl Journal of Climatology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Southeastern South America is influenced by moisture transport from lower latitudes, sustains intense convective storms and is a land-atmosphere coupling hotspot, but the interconnection between these processes is still not well understood. We present the warm-season diurnal cycle climatology of the atmospheric water balance components in the South American Low-Level Jet (SALLJ) exit region in northeastern Argentina during 1998-2012. Different precipitation-based types of events (clear-sky and rainy days) were explored together with processes tied to the land-atmosphere coupling at the daily scale. Our research was based on simulations with and without soil moisture-atmosphere coupling with the RCA4 regional climate model. A control simulation was compared with a sensitivity simulation where the soil moisture was prescribed with the daily climatological values from the control run. The ERA5 reanalysis and the satellite precipitation products TRMM-3B42 v7 and CMORPH v1.0 bias-corrected were used for comparative purposes. From the diurnal water balance analysis, we found that moisture flux convergence in the region is the main driver for nocturnal precipitation while local evapotranspiration feeds afternoon rain events. Rainy afternoons do not show differences between simulations, but rainy nights seem to be affected. Moreover, daily correlations between surface and boundary-layer variables showed that the local coupling is weaker during rainy days than during clear-sky days. Therefore, we suggest that changes in non-local drivers, such as the moisture flux through the SALLJ, are more relevant for rainy nights than the local coupling.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Warm‐season precipitation drivers in northeastern Argentina: Diurnal cycle of the atmospheric moisture balance and land–atmosphere coupling

Giles

Ruscica

Menéndez

2020

Intl Journal of Climatology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…(). The two models have been used extensively over South America in different international projects such as CLARIS, CLARIS‐LPB and CORDEX (Menéndez et al ., , , ; Carril et al ., ; Ruscica et al ., , , ; Sánchez et al ., ; Falco et al ., ; Spennemann et al ., ; Zaninelli et al ., ). The spatial domain includes the South American continent and adjacent oceans at approximately 50 km resolution and the models were driven every 6 hr with boundary conditions from ERA‐Interim reanalysis (Dee et al ., ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diurnal cycle of precipitation over South America represented by five gridded datasets

Giles

Ruscica

Menéndez

2019

Intl Journal of Climatology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A characterization of the diurnal cycle of precipitation (DCP) over the whole South America is still lacking in the literature and the scarcity of sub‐daily rain ground measurements limits the data available for analysis and forbids a correct validation of alternative datasets. In this paper we analyse the climatological mean DCP during the monsoon active season using five gridded datasets: two satellite precipitation estimates, two regional climate models and one reanalysis. Amazonia, the Brazilian Highlands, the northeastern South American coast, the Andes and the western Colombian coast are identified as the areas with most prominent DCPs. The afternoon convection triggered by solar heating over land and the coastal and topographic effects are the main modes of sub‐daily variability, based on an EOF decomposition of the 3 hourly mean precipitation fields. We explore the contribution of mean frequency and intensity to amount of precipitation and nighttime–daytime differences. In general, both models precipitate earlier and more frequently than the satellite products and do not reproduce correctly areas of observed predominant nighttime precipitation where mesoscale convective systems are active, like La Plata Basin or Amazonia. Over the analysed areas, the high frequency of precipitation is the driving mechanism of total amount in the models, whereas in the satellite products there is also considerable contribution from intensity. Overall, the reanalysis shows features in between the models and the satellite estimates, sharing characteristics with both types of data. The results presented here point at the diversity of sub‐daily precipitation characteristics in South America, the issues with conventional climate models and the uncertainty in satellite products and reanalyses. The growing interest in the DCP by the scientific community and the development of new techniques like convection permitting modelling will hopefully continue to improve our knowledge of the precipitation dynamics and its influence on climate.

show abstract

Subseasonal prediction performance for South American land–atmosphere coupling in extended austral summer

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Land-atmosphere feedbacks, through water and energy exchanges, provide subseasonal-to-seasonal predictability of the hydrological cycle. We analyse subseasonal land-atmosphere coupling over South America (SA) during extended austral summer for the soil moisture-to-precipitation and soil moisture-to-air temperature feedback pathways. We evaluate subseasonal hindcasts from global forecasting systems from the UK Met Office, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts and the Center for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies (CPTEC), for the common period of 1999-2010, against two reanalyses. Biases in landatmosphere states are established in the first week of hindcasts and increase with lead time. By Week 5, all the models only demonstrate good performance over northern, northeastern and southeastern SA for soil moisture and evapotranspiration and over tropical and subtropical SA for temperature. The hindcasts show stronger coupling at longer lead-lag between variables than reanalyses.Our results highlight possible deficiencies in feedbacks between soil moisture and precipitation in CPTEC and NCEP forecasts over the Amazon due to initial dry soil moisture biases, and in feedbacks between soil moisture and temperature for all four investigated models over southeastern SA due to erroneous representations of evapotranspiration.

show abstract

Temperature variability and soil–atmosphere interaction in South America simulated by two regional climate models

Cited by 23 publications

References 49 publications

Warm‐season precipitation drivers in northeastern Argentina: Diurnal cycle of the atmospheric moisture balance and land–atmosphere coupling

Warm‐season precipitation drivers in northeastern Argentina: Diurnal cycle of the atmospheric moisture balance and land–atmosphere coupling

The diurnal cycle of precipitation over South America represented by five gridded datasets

Subseasonal prediction performance for South American land–atmosphere coupling in extended austral summer

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About