An Overview of ARTMIP's Tier 2 Reanalysis Intercomparison: Uncertainty in the Detection of Atmospheric Rivers and Their Associated Precipitation
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- Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD (United States); Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
- National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States)
- Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States); California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab. (JPL)
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States)
- Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States)
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
- Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States); Tomorrow.io, Boston, MA (United States)
- Univ. of Melbourne, VIC (Australia)
- Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
- Univ. of Lisbon (Portugal)
- Univ. of Grenoble Alpes, Saint-Martin-d-Heres (France)
- University of Aveiro (Portugal)
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States). Scripps Inst. of Oceanography
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Atmospheric rivers, or long but narrow regions of enhanced water vapor transport, are an important component of the hydrologic cycle as they are responsible for much of the poleward transport of water vapor and result in precipitation, sometimes extreme in intensity. Despite their importance, much uncertainty remains in the detection of atmospheric rivers in large datasets such as reanalyses and century scale climate simulations. To understand this uncertainty, the Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP) developed tiered experiments, including the Tier 2 Reanalysis Intercomparison that is presented here. Eleven detection algorithms submitted hourly tags--binary fields indicating the presence or absence of atmospheric rivers--of detected atmospheric rivers in the Modern Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2) and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' Reanalysis Version 5 (ERA5) as well as six-hourly tags in the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55). Due to a higher climatological mean for integrated water vapor transport in MERRA-2, atmospheric rivers were detected more frequently relative to the other two reanalyses, particularly in algorithms that use a fixed threshold for water vapor transport. The finer horizontal resolution of ERA5 resulted in narrower atmospheric rivers and an ability to detect atmospheric rivers along resolved coastlines. We found that the fraction of hemispheric area covered by ARs varies throughout the year in all three reanalyses, with different atmospheric river detection tools having different seasonal cycles.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT); French National Research Agency (ANR); National Science Foundation (NSF); Australian Research Council; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830; AC02-05CH11231; 80NSSC20K1344; 80NSSC21K1007; CEECIND/00027/2017; PTDC/CTA-GEO/29029/2017; ANR-20-CE01-0013; ANR-14-CE01-0001; ANR-16-CE01-0011; DGE-1735040; DE180100638
- OSTI ID:
- 1987514
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1960396
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-178836
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Vol. 127, Issue 8; ISSN 2169-897X
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical UnionCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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