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Projected changes in atmospheric river events in Arizona as simulated by global and regional climate models

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Abstract

Inland-penetrating atmospheric rivers (ARs) affect the United States Southwest and significantly contribute to cool season precipitation. In this study, we examine the results from an ensemble of dynamically downscaled simulations from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) and their driving general circulation models (GCMs) in order to determine statistically significant changes in the intensity of the cool season ARs impacting Arizona and the associated precipitation. Future greenhouse gas emissions follow the A2 emission scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report simulations. We find that there is a consistent and clear intensification of the AR-related water vapor transport in both the global and regional simulations which reflects the increase in water vapor content due to warmer atmospheric temperatures, according to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. However, the response of AR-related precipitation intensity to increased moisture flux and column-integrated water vapor is weak and no significant changes are projected either by the GCMs or the NARCCAP models. This lack of robust precipitation variations can be explained in part by the absence of meaningful changes in both the large-scale water vapor flux convergence and the maximum positive relative vorticity in the GCMs. Additionally, some global models show a robust decrease in relative humidity which may also be responsible for the projected precipitation patterns.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the Ph.D. dissertation of E. R. Rivera at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. Support for this study has been provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant 1038938 and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Grant NNX14AD77G. The work of Rivera was also supported by the University of Costa Rica (UCR) Grants OAICE-10-CAB-192-2010, OAICE-AD-05-069-2013, VI-805-B0-065 and VI-805-B5-296. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF, NASA or UCR. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript. We also thank Gary Wick from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for giving us access to the AR detection tool (ARDT) and the NARCCAP program for providing the data used in this paper. NARCCAP is funded by the NSF, the US Department of Energy (DoE), NOAA, and the US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development (EPA). ECMWF ERA-Interim data have been obtained from the ECMWF Data Server (http://www.ecmwf.int).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Center for Geophysical Research, University of Costa Rica, San Jose, 11501-2060, Costa Rica

    Erick R. Rivera

  2. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

    Francina Dominguez

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  1. Erick R. Rivera
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  2. Francina Dominguez
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Correspondence to Erick R. Rivera.

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Rivera, E.R., Dominguez, F. Projected changes in atmospheric river events in Arizona as simulated by global and regional climate models. Clim Dyn 47, 1673–1691 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2927-0

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