Daniel Lüthi

The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer heatwaves.

Instrumental observations and reconstructions of global and hemispheric temperature evolution reveal a pronounced warming during the past ∼150 years. One expression of this warming is the observed increase in the occurrence of heatwaves. Conceptually this increase is understood as a shift of the statistical distribution towards warmer temperatures, while changes in the width of the distribution are often considered small. Here we show that this framework fails to explain the record-breaking central European summer temperatures in 2003, although it is consistent with observations from previous years. We find that an event like that of summer 2003 is statistically extremely unlikely, even when the observed warming is taken into account. We propose that a regime with an increased variability of temperatures (in addition to increases in mean temperature) may be able to account for summer 2003. To test this proposal, we simulate possible future European climate with a regional climate model in a scenario with increased atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, and find that temperature variability increases by up to 100%, with maximum changes in central and eastern Europe.

Land-atmosphere coupling and climate change in Europe.

Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations are expected to enhance the interannual variability of summer climate in Europe and other mid-latitude regions, potentially causing more frequent heatwaves. Climate models consistently predict an increase in the variability of summer temperatures in these areas, but the underlying mechanisms responsible for this increase remain uncertain. Here we explore these mechanisms using regional simulations of recent and future climatic conditions with and without land–atmosphere interactions. Our results indicate that the increase in summer temperature variability predicted in central and eastern Europe is mainly due to feedbacks between the land surface and the atmosphere. Furthermore, they suggest that land–atmosphere interactions increase climate variability in this region because climatic regimes in Europe shift northwards in response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, creating a new transitional climate zone with strong land–atmosphere coupling in central and eastern Europe. These findings emphasize the importance of soil-moisture–temperature feedbacks (in addition to soil-moisture–precipitation feedbacks) in influencing summer climate variability and the potential migration of climate zones with strong land–atmosphere coupling as a consequence of global warming. This highlights the crucial role of land–atmosphere interactions in future climate change.

Soil Moisture-Atmosphere Interactions during the 2003 European Summer Heat Wave

The role of land surface–related processes and feedbacks during the record-breaking 2003 European summer heat wave is explored with a regional climate model. All simulations are driven by lateral boundary conditions and sea surface temperatures from the ECMWF operational analysis and 40-yr ECMWF ReAnalysis (ERA-40), thereby prescribing the large-scale circulation. In particular, the contribution of soil moisture anomalies and their interactions with the atmosphere through latent and sensible heat fluxes is investigated. Sensitivity experiments are performed by perturbing spring soil moisture in order to determine its influence on the formation of the heat wave. A multiyear regional climate simulation for 1970–2000 using a fixed model setup is used as the reference period. A large precipitation deficit together with early vegetation green-up and strong positive radiative anomalies in the months preceding the extreme summer event contributed to an early and rapid loss of soil moisture, which exceeded the multiyear average by far. The exceptionally high temperature anomalies, most pronounced in June and August 2003, were initiated by persistent anticyclonic circulation anomalies that enabled a dominance of the local heat balance. In this experiment the hottest phase in early August is realistically simulated despite the absence of an anomaly in total surface net radiation. This indicates an important role of the partitioning of net radiation in latent and sensible heat fluxes, which is to a large extent controlled by soil moisture. The lack of soil moisture strongly reduced latent cooling and thereby amplified the surface temperature anomalies. The evaluation of the experiments with perturbed spring soil moisture shows that this quantity is an important parameter for the evolution of European heat waves. Simulations indicate that without soil moisture anomalies the summer heat anomalies could have been reduced by around 40% in some regions. Moreover, drought conditions are revealed to influence the tropospheric circulation by producing a surface heat low and enhanced ridging in the midtroposphere. This suggests a positive feedback mechanism between soil moisture, continental-scale circulation, and temperature.

The Soil-Precipitation Feedback: A Process Study with a Regional Climate Model

Abstract Month-long integrations with a regional climate model covering Europe and the Northern Atlantic are utilized to study the sensitivity of the summertime European precipitation climate with respect to the continental-scale soil moisture content. Experiments are conducted for July 1990 and 1993. For each of the two months, the control experiment with the initial soil water distribution derived from the operational ECMWF analysis is compared against two sensitivity experiments with dry and wet initial soil moisture distributions. The results demonstrate that summertime European precipitation climate in a belt ∼1000 km wide between the wet Atlantic and the dry Mediterranean climate heavily depends upon the soil moisture content. In this belt, changes in monthly mean precipitation amount to about half of the changes in mean evapotranspiration. Budget analysis of water substance over selected subdomains demonstrate that the simulated sensitivity cannot be interpreted with the classical recycling mechani...

Heavy precipitation processes in a warmer climate

Climate simulations have suggested that a greenhouse-gas induced global warming would also lead to a moistening of the atmosphere and an intensification of the mean hydrological cycle. Here we study possible attendant effects upon the frequency of heavy precipitation events. For this purpose simulations with a regional climate model are conducted, driven by observed and modified lateral boundary conditions and sea-surface temperature distributions. The modifications correspond to a uniform 2K temperature increase and an attendant 15% increase of the specific humidity (unchanged relative humidity). This strategy allows to isolate the effects of an increased atmospheric moisture content from changes in the atmospheric circulation. The numerical experiments, carried out over Europe and for the fall season, indicate a substantial shift towards more frequent events of strong precipitation. The magnitude of the response increases with the intensity of the event and reaches several 10s of percent for events exceeding 30 mm per day. These results appear to apply to all precipitation events dominated by sea-to-land moisture transport.

A New Terrain-Following Vertical Coordinate Formulation for Atmospheric Prediction Models

Most numerical weather prediction models rely on a terrain-following coordinate framework. The computational mesh is thus characterized by inhomogeneities with scales determined by the underlying topography. Such inhomogeneities may affect the truncation error of numerical schemes. In this study, a new class of terrainfollowing coordinate systems for use in atmospheric prediction models is proposed. Unlike conventional systems, the new smooth level vertical (SLEVE) coordinate yields smooth coordinates at mid- and upper levels. The basic concept of the new coordinate is to employ a scale-dependent vertical decay of underlying terrain features. The decay rate is selected such that small-scale topographic variations decay much faster with height than their large-scale counterparts. This generalization implies a nonlocal coordinate transformation. The new coordinate is tested and compared against standard sigma and hybrid coordinate systems using an idealized advection test. It is demonstrated that the presence of coordinate transformations induces substantial truncation errors. These are critical for grid inhomogeneities with wavelengths smaller than approximately eight grid increments, and may overpower the regular-grid truncation error of the underlying finite-difference approximation. These results are confirmed by a theoretical analysis of the truncation error. In addition, the new coordinate is tested in idealized and real-case numerical experiments using a nonhydrostatic model. The simulations using the new coordinate yield a substantial reduction of small-scale noise in dynamical and thermodynamical model fields.

Seasonality and Interannual Variability of the Westerly Jet in the Tibetan Plateau Region

Abstract In this study, 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) data are used for the description of the seasonal cycle and the interannual variability of the westerly jet in the Tibetan Plateau region. To complement results based on the analysis of monthly mean horizontal wind speeds, an occurrence-based jet climatology is constructed by identifying the locations of the jet axes at 6-hourly intervals throughout 1958–2001. Thus, a dataset describing the highly transient and localized features of jet variability is obtained. During winter and summer the westerly jet is located, respectively, to the south and north of the Tibetan Plateau. During the spring and autumn seasons there are jet transitions from south to north and vice versa. The median dates for these transitions are 28 April and 12 October. The spring transition is associated with large interannual variations, while the fall transition occurs more reliably within a 3-week period. The strength of the jet exhibits a peculiar seasonal cycle. During northw...

Analysis of ERA40-driven CLM simulations for Europe

The Climate Local Model (CLM) is a community Regional Climate Model (RCM) based on the COSMO weather forecast model. We present a validation of long-term ERA40-driven CLM simulations performed with different model versions. In particular we analyse three simulations with differences in boundary nudging and horizontal resolution performed for the EU-project ENSEMBLES with the model version 2.4.6, and one with the latest version 4.0. Moreover, we include for comparison a long-term simulation with the RCM CHRM previously used at ETH Zurich. We provide a thorough validation of temperature, precipitation, net radiation, cloud cover, circulation, evaporation and terrestrial water storage for winter and summer. For temperature and precipitation the interannual variability is additionally assessed. While simulations with CLM version 2.4.6 are generally too warm and dry in summer but still within the typical error of PRUDENCE simulations, version 4.0 has an anomalous cold and wet bias. This is partly due to a strong underestimation of the net radiation associated with cloud cover overestimation. Two similar CLM 2.4.6 simulations with different spatial resolutions (0.44° and 0.22°) reveal for the analysed fields no clear benefit of the higher resolution except for better resolved fine-scale structures. While the large-scale circulation is represented more realistically with spectral nudging, temperature and precipitation are not. Overall, CLM performs comparatively to other state-of-the-art RCMs over Europe.

Surrogate climate-change scenarios for regional climate models

A methodology is presented for generating surrogate climate-change scenarios with a regional climate model. The procedure is simple to implement and dynamically consistent. It entails (i) adopting a realized or simulated atmospheric flow evolution and (ii) prescribing specific thermodynamic modifications of this realization to a regional models initial fields and externally-specified time-dependent lateral boundaries fields. The resulting scenarios can be used for process and parameterization studies, to calibrate the regional response to a putative global climate change, and to intercompare different models. The approach is illustrated with two month-long regional climate model simulations. The experiment is designed to explore the response within Europe to a pseudo-global warming of 2 K with an accompanying increase in atmospheric water vapor content. Analysis reveals that there is a spatially-differentiated preciptation increase consonant with the domain-averaged increase of about 16% in the water vapor content.

Inferring Changes in Terrestrial Water Storage Using ERA-40 Reanalysis Data: The Mississippi River Basin

Abstract Terrestrial water storage is an essential part of the hydrological cycle, encompassing crucial elements of the climate system, such as soil moisture, groundwater, snow, and land ice. On a regional scale, it is however not a readily measured variable and observations of its individual components are scarce. This study investigates the feasability of estimating monthly terrestrial water-storage variations from water-balance computations, using the following three variables: water vapor flux convergence, atmospheric water vapor content, and river runoff. The two first variables are available with high resolution and good accuracy in the present reanalysis datasets, and river runoff is commonly measured in most parts of the world. The applicability of this approach is tested in a 10-yr (1987–96) case study for the Mississippi River basin. Data used include European Centre for Medium- Range Weather Forecasts 40-yr reanalysis (ERA-40) data (water vapor flux and atmospheric water vapor content) and runo...