Journal
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES
Volume 125, Issue 21, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2020JD033421
Keywords
atmospheric rivers; CC scaling; sensitivity; aquaplanet; attribution
Categories
Funding
- NASA [NNX16AG62G]
- Department of Energy Office of Science [DE-SC0016605]
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, hatch project under California Agricultural Experiment Station [1010971, 1016611]
- Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
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Filaments of intense vapor transport called atmospheric rivers (ARs) are responsible for the majority of poleward vapor transport in the midlatitudes. Despite their importance to the hydrologic cycle, there remain many unanswered questions about changes to ARs in a warming climate. In this study we perform a series of escalating uniform SST increases (+2, +4, and +6K, respectively) in the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 in an aquaplanet configuration to evaluate the thermodynamic and dynamical response of AR vapor content, transport, and precipitation to warming SSTs. We find that AR column integrated water vapor (IWV) is especially sensitive to SST and increases by 6.3-9.7% per degree warming despite decreasing relative humidity through much of the column. Further analysis provides a more nuanced view of AR IWV changes: Since SST warming is modest compared to that in the midtroposphere, computing fractional changes in IWV with respect to SST results in finding spuriously large increases. Meanwhile, results here show that AR IWV transport increases relatively uniformly with temperature and at consistently lower rates than IWV, as modulated by systematically decreasing low-level wind speeds. Similarly, changes in AR precipitation are related to a compensatory relationship between enhanced near-surface moisture and damped vertical motions.
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