Abstract
In a warming climate, atmospheric wave activity and associated weather patterns may change, although conflicting results have been reported on this topic. Additionally, atmospheric wave changes in a future climate have mainly focused on waves of a specified spatial scale, rather than a particular spatiotemporal scale. Here, changes in the variability of Rossby waves of multiple spatiotemporal scales are analyzed using the wavenumber-frequency power spectrum, a tool commonly applied to analyze atmospheric equatorial waves. Daily 500 hPa geopotential height data over 40°–60°N from historical (1950–2005) and future (2006–2099) simulations from 20 models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) under the RCP8.5 scenario were analyzed. When compared to the historical period, the late 21st century climate projections showed a decline in spectral power for both eastward and westward propagating waves with wavenumbers greater than 8 that spanned over all frequencies in all seasons, but an increase in mean power for eastward propagating waves with wavenumbers 1–7 over all frequencies was shown in winter and spring. This increase in power was accompanied by increased variance, i.e., an increased meridional extent of 500 hPa ridges and troughs, and was the result of increases in the mean number of high amplitude events and duration of activity within this wave band. These results indicate that large-scale (~ 104 km) eastward propagating weather systems may intensify with higher amplitudes for ridges and troughs, while short-scale (102–103 km) weather systems may decrease in their intensity due to reduced variability in the late 21st century under the high emissions scenario. Potential mechanisms for these changes are discussed, including enhanced Arctic warming and midlatitude-tropical interactions.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the CMIP5 modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling for their efforts in making the CMIP5 multimodel dataset listed in Table 1 available through the Earth System Grid Federation (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/). Aiguo Dai and Heather S. Sussman acknowledge funding support from the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) Fellowship, the National Science Foundation (AGS-1353740 and OISE-1743738), the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DE-SC0012602), and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NA15OAR4310086 and NA18OAR4310425). Ajay Raghavendra acknowledges funding support from NSF AGS-1535426, and Paul E. Roundy acknowledges funding support from NSF AGS-1358214 and AGS-1128779. The authors also thank Dr. Elizabeth A. Barnes for insightful discussions that helped to improve the quality of this work. The authors also extend gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments that have tremendously improved the quality of this work and Dr. Susanna Corti for serving as the Editor of this paper.
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Sussman, H.S., Raghavendra, A., Roundy, P.E. et al. Trends in northern midlatitude atmospheric wave power from 1950 to 2099. Clim Dyn 54, 2903–2918 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05143-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05143-3