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Winter westerly disturbance dynamics and precipitation in the western Himalaya and Karakoram: a wave-tracking approach

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Abstract

Extratropical cyclones, including winter westerly disturbances (WWD) over central Asia, are fundamental features of the atmosphere that maintain energy, momentum, and moisture at global scales while intimately linking large-scale circulation to regional-scale meteorology. Within high mountain Asia, WWD are the primary contributor to regional precipitation during winter. In this work, we present a novel WWD tracking methodology, which provides an inventory of location, timing, intensity, and duration of events, allowing for a comprehensive study of the factors that relate WWD to orographic precipitation, on an individual event basis and in the aggregate. We identify the relationship between the strength of disturbances, the state of the background environment during their propagation, and precipitation totals in the Karakoram/western Himalaya. We observe significant differences in convective and mechanical instability contributions to orographic precipitation as a function of the relationship between the intensity of WWD and the background temperature and moisture fields, which exhibit strong intraseasonal variability. Precipitation is primarily orographically forced during intense WWD with strong cross-barrier winds, while weaker WWD with similar precipitation totals are observed to benefit from enhanced instability due to high moisture content and temperature at low levels, occurring primarily in the late winter/premonsoon. The contribution of these factors is observed to fluctuate on a per-case basis, indicating important influences of intraseasonal oscillations and tropical-extratropical interactions on regional precipitation.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Climate and Large-scale Dynamics Program, from the National Science Foundation (NSF award-AGS 1116105) and by NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program (Grant Number 13-EARTH13F-26). The CFSR data used in this research were developed by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and provided by NCAR. TRMM data were acquired by an international joint project sponsored by the Japan National Space Development Agency (NASDA) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of Earth Science. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Bodo Bookhagen for his help throughout this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Forest Cannon, Leila M.V. Carvalho & Charles Jones

  2. Earth Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Forest Cannon, Leila M.V. Carvalho, Charles Jones & Jesse Norris

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  1. Forest Cannon
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Correspondence to Forest Cannon.

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Cannon, F., Carvalho, L.M., Jones, C. et al. Winter westerly disturbance dynamics and precipitation in the western Himalaya and Karakoram: a wave-tracking approach. Theor Appl Climatol 125, 27–44 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1489-8

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