The importance of fronts for extreme precipitation

Catto, Jennifer L.; Pfahl, Stephan

doi:10.1002/jgrd.50852

Cited by 188 publications

(157 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…This suggests that our approach has more limited value for analysing climate change in the Gibraltar and western Iberia areas, which will therefore be marginally discussed in this paper. More insight into this region might be obtained using front-identification based approaches, such as that adopted in Catto and Pfahl (2013). .…”

Section: The Cyclone Associated Precipitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extratropical cyclones and the projected decline of winter Mediterranean precipitation in the CMIP5 models

et al. 2014

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Section: The Cyclone Associated Precipitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extratropical cyclones and the projected decline of winter Mediterranean precipitation in the CMIP5 models

et al. 2014

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“…In this case, cyclones are displaced from the location of the precipitation and are important for directing the flow of moist air towards the topography. In addition, remote effects of cyclones on precipitation extremes can be associated with ascent along elongated fronts (Catto and Pfahl, 2013) and in warm conveyor belts . Precipitation in mountainous regions often results from the interaction of these different lifting mechanisms (Houze Jr., 2012).…”

Section: Precipitation Extremesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterising the relationship between weather extremes in Europe and synoptic circulation features

Pfahl

2014

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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138

132

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Abstract. Extreme weather events in Europe are closely linked to anomalies of the atmospheric circulation and in particular to circulation features like cyclones and atmospheric blocking. In this study, this linkage is systematically characterised with the help of conditional cyclone and blocking frequencies during precipitation, wind gust and temperature extremes at various locations in Europe. Such conditional frequency fields can serve as a dynamical fingerprint of the extreme events and yield insights into their most important physical driving mechanisms. Precipitation extremes over the ocean and over flat terrain are shown to be closely related to cyclones in the vicinity and the associated dynamical lifting. For extreme precipitation over complex terrain, cyclone anomalies are found at more remote locations, favouring the flow of moist air towards the topography. Wind gust extremes are associated with cyclone and blocking anomalies in opposite directions, with the cyclones occurring mostly over the North and Baltic seas for extreme events in central Europe. This setting is associated with pronounced surface pressure gradients and thus high near-surface wind velocities. Hot temperature extremes in northern and central Europe typically occur in the vicinity of a blocking anticyclone, where subsidence and radiative forcing are strong. Over southern Europe, blocking anomalies are shifted more to the north or northeast, indicating a more important role of warm air advection. Large-scale flow conditions for cold extremes are similar at many locations in Europe, with blocking anomalies over the North Atlantic and northern Europe and cyclone anomalies southeast of the cold extreme, both contributing to the advection of cold air masses. This characterisation of synoptic-scale forcing mechanisms can be helpful for better understanding and anticipating weather extremes and their long-term changes.

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“…Rainfall in the CS and ECS regions is often associated with one of a number of different phenomena including fronts (Catto and Pfahl 2013), subtropical cyclones (Hopkins and Holland 1997) and thunderstorms (Kuleshov et al 2006). Projected changes to rainfall associated with these synoptic systems are either currently unavailable or have a high degree of uncertainty associated with them in the east Australia region (see Dowdy et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of various climate change projections of eastern Australian rainfall

Grose¹,

Bhend²,

Argüeso³

et al. 2015

AMOJ

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The Australian eastern seaboard is a distinct climate entity from the interior of the continent, with different climatic influences on each side of the Great Dividing Range. Therefore, it is plausible that downscaling of global climate models could reveal meaningful regional detail, or 'added value', in the climate change signal of mean rainfall change in eastern Australia under future scenarios. However, because downscaling is typically done using a limited set of global climate models and downscaling methods, the results from a downscaling study may not represent the range of uncertainty in plausible projected change for a region suggested by the ensemble of host global climate models. A complete and unbiased representation of the plausible changes in the climate is essential in producing climate projections useful for future planning. As part of this aim it is important to quantify any differences in the change signal between global climate models and downscaling, and understand the cause of these differences in terms of plausible added regional detail in the climate change signal, the impact of sub-sampling global climate models and the effect of the downscaling models themselves. Here we examine rainfall projections in eastern Australia under a high emissions scenario by late in the century from ensembles of global climate models, two dynamical downscaling models and one statistical downscaling model. We find no cases where all three downscaling methods show the same clear regional spatial detail in the change signal that is distinct from the host models. However, some downscaled projections suggest that the eastern seaboard could see little change in spring rainfall, in contrast to the substantial rainfall decrease inland. The change signal in the downscaled outputs is broadly similar at the large scale in the various model outputs, with a few notable exceptions. For example, the model median from dynamical downscaling projects a rainfall increase over the entirety of eastern Australia in autumn that is greater than the global models. Also, there are some instances where a downscaling method produces changes outside the range of host models over eastern Australia as a whole, thus expanding the projected range of uncertainty. Results are particularly uncertain for summer, where no two downscaling studies clearly agree. There are also some confounding factors from the model configuration used in downscaling, where the particular zones used for statistical models and the model components used in dynamical models have an influence on results and produce additional uncertainty.

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The importance of fronts for extreme precipitation

Cited by 188 publications

References 25 publications

Extratropical cyclones and the projected decline of winter Mediterranean precipitation in the CMIP5 models

Extratropical cyclones and the projected decline of winter Mediterranean precipitation in the CMIP5 models

Characterising the relationship between weather extremes in Europe and synoptic circulation features

Comparison of various climate change projections of eastern Australian rainfall

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