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Abstract Vulnerability‐based frameworks are increasingly used to better understand water system performance under climate change. This work advances the use of stochastic weather generators for climate vulnerability assessments that simulate weather based on patterns of regional atmospheric flow (i.e., weather regimes) conditioned on global‐scale climate features. The model is semiparametric by design and includes (1) a nonhomogeneous Markov chain for weather regime simulation; (2) block bootstrapping and a Gaussian copula for multivariate, multisite weather simulation; and (3) modules to impose thermodynamic and dynamical climate change, including Clausius‐Clapeyron precipitation scaling, elevation‐dependent warming, and shifting dynamics of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In this way, the model can be used to evaluate climate impacts on water systems based on hypotheses of dynamic and thermodynamic climate change. The model is developed and tested for cold‐season climate in the Tuolumne River Basin in California but is broadly applicable across the western United States. Results show that eight weather regimes exert strong influences over local climate in the Tuolumne Basin. Model simulations adequately preserve many of the historical statistics for precipitation and temperature across sites, including the mean, variance, skew, and extreme values. Annual precipitation and temperature are somewhat underdispersed, and precipitation spell statistics are negatively biased by 1‐2 days. For simulations of future climate, the model can generate a range of Clausius‐Clapeyron scaling relationships and modes of elevation‐dependent warming. Model simulations also suggest a muted response of Tuolumne climate to changes in ENSO variability.
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How Moist and Dry Intrusions Control the Local Hydrologic Cycle in Present and Future Climates
Abstract Models disagree on how much the hydrologic cycle could intensify under climate change. These changes are expected to scale with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation but may locally diverge due in part to the uncertain response of the general circulation, causing the hydrologic cycle to inherit this uncertainty. To identify how the circulation contributes, we link circulation changes to changes in the higher moments of the hydrologic cycle using the novel dynamical framework of the local hydrologic cycle, the portion of the hydrologic cycle driven by moist or dry intrusions. We expand this dynamical framework, developing a closed budget which diagnoses thermodynamic, advective, and overturning contributions to future hydrologic cycle changes. In analyzing these changes for the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble, we show that overturning is the main dynamic contributor to the tropical and subtropical annual response, consistent with a weakening of this circulation. In the extratropics, we show that advective contributions, likely from storm track changes, dominate the response. We achieve a cleaner separation between dynamic and thermodynamic contributions through a semi-empirical scaling, which reveals the robustness of the Clausius-Clapeyron scaling for the local hydrologic cycle. This scaling also demonstrates the slowing of the local hydrologic cycle and how changing subtropical dynamics asymmetrically impact wave breaking and suppress meridional moisture transport. We conclude that dynamic changes in the subtropics are predominantly responsible for the annual, dynamic response in the extratropics and thus a significant contributor to uncertainty in future projections.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813981
- PAR ID:
- 10220955
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- ISSN:
- 0894-8755
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 56
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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We explore the relative roles of Earth’s axial tilt (‘tilt effect’) and orbital eccentricity (‘distance effect’) in generating the seasonal cycle of tropical sea surface temperature (SST), decomposing the two contributions using simulations of an Earth System model varying eccentricity and longitude of perihelion. Tropical SST seasonality is largely explained by the annual contribution from tilt, but with significant contributions from the semiannual contribution from tilt and annual contribution from distance, especially in regions where the tilt annual contribution is relatively small. Precessional changes to tropical SST seasonality are readily explained by the distance annual component whose amplitude increases linearly with eccentricity and whose phase changes linearly with the longitude of perihelion, while the tilt contributions remain essentially unchanged. As such, the annual cycle contribution from distance can become significant at high eccentricity (e > 0.05) and dominate the SST annual cycle in some regions of the Tropics. The annual cycle tropical SST response to the distance effect consists of a tropics-wide warming peaking ∼2 months after perihelion consistent with a direct thermodynamic effect, and a dynamic contribution characterized by a cooling of the Pacific cold tongue peaking 5-6 months after perihelion. For current orbital conditions, the thermodynamic contribution acts to dampen the tropical SST seasonal cycle of the northern hemisphere from the tilt influence and amplify it in the southern hemisphere. The dynamic contribution acts to shift the Pacific cold tongue seasonal cycle arising from tilt to earlier in the season, by ∼1 month.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0780.1
