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Great Plains Hydroclimate Variability: The View from North American Regional Reanalysis

Journal Article · · Journal of Climate
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli3768.1· OSTI ID:902773
 [1];  [2]
  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland; University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
  2. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland
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Interannual variability of warm-season rainfall over the Great Plains is analyzed using the recently released North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). The new dataset differs from its global counterparts in the additional assimilation of precipitation and radiances. This along with the use of a more comprehensive land surface model in generation of NARR offers the prospect of obtaining improved estimates of surface hydrologic and near-surface meteorological fields. NARR’s representation of hydroclimate is used to weigh in on the authors’ recent finding of the dominance of large-scale moisture flux convergence over evaporation in accounting for Great Plains precipitation variations. Evaporation estimates are notoriously uncertain and, while the NARR ones are not assured to be realistic, they are more constrained than those diagnosed before from inline and offline assessments. NARR’s portrayal of warm-season hydroclimate variability corroborates the importance of remote water sources in generation of Great Plains precipitation variability and supports the authors’ claim that some state-of-the-art atmosphere/land surface models vigorously recycle precipitation, erroneously, at least in context of Great Plains interannual variability. These very models have been key to recent claims of strong coupling between soil moisture and precipitation.
Research Organization:
Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Research (ER)
DOE Contract Number:
FG02-01ER63258
OSTI ID:
902773
Report Number(s):
DOE/ER/63258-6
Journal Information:
Journal of Climate, Journal Name: Journal of Climate Journal Issue: 12 Vol. 19; ISSN 0894-8755
Publisher:
American Meteorological Society
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (9)

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Regions of Strong Coupling Between Soil Moisture and Precipitation journal August 2004
The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project journal March 1996
The Moisture Budget of the Central United States in Spring as Evaluated in the NCEP/NCAR and the NASA/DAO Reanalyses journal May 1996
Analysis of Model-Calculated Soil Moisture over the United States (1931–1993) and Applications to Long-Range Temperature Forecasts journal June 1996
Evaluation of the atmospheric moisture and hydrological cycle in the NCEP/NCAR reanalyses journal March 1998
A 36-yr Climatological Description of the Evaporative Sources of Warm-Season Precipitation in the Mississippi River Basin journal December 2001
Global Precipitation and Thunderstorm Frequencies. Part I: Seasonal and Interannual Variations journal March 2001
Implementation of Noah land surface model advances in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction operational mesoscale Eta model journal November 2003

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