Juergen Bader

Variability and Predictability of West African Droughts: A Review on the Role of Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies

AbstractThe Sahel experienced a severe drought during the 1970s and 1980s after wet periods in the 1950s and 1960s. Although rainfall partially recovered since the 1990s, the drought had devastating impacts on society. Most studies agree that this dry period resulted primarily from remote effects of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies amplified by local land surface–atmosphere interactions. This paper reviews advances made during the last decade to better understand the impact of global SST variability on West African rainfall at interannual to decadal time scales. At interannual time scales, a warming of the equatorial Atlantic and Pacific/Indian Oceans results in rainfall reduction over the Sahel, and positive SST anomalies over the Mediterranean Sea tend to be associated with increased rainfall. At decadal time scales, warming over the tropics leads to drought over the Sahel, whereas warming over the North Atlantic promotes increased rainfall. Prediction systems have evolved from seasonal to decada...

North Atlantic Oscillation Response to Anomalous Indian Ocean SST in a Coupled GCM

The dominant pattern of atmospheric variability in the North Atlantic sector is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Since the 1970s the NAO has been well characterized by a trend toward its positive phase. Recent atmospheric general circulation model studies have linked this trend to a progressive warming of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, a clear mechanism responsible for the change of the NAO could not be given. This study provides further details of the NAO response to Indian Ocean sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. This is done by conducting experiments with a coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation model (OAGCM). The authors develop a hypothesis of how the Indian Ocean impacts the NAO.

The Observed Hemispheric Symmetry in Reflected Shortwave Irradiance

While the concentration of landmasses and atmospheric aerosols on the Northern Hemisphere suggests that the Northern Hemisphere is brighter than the Southern Hemisphere, satellite measurements of top-of-atmosphere irradiancesfound thatboth hemispheresreflectnearlythesameamountofshortwaveirradiance.Here,theauthors document that the most precise and accurate observation, the energy balanced and filled dataset of the Clouds andtheEarth’sRadiantEnergySystemcoveringthe period2000–10,measures anabsolute hemisphericdifference in reflected shortwave irradiance of 0.1 W m 22 . In contrast, the longwave irradiance of the two hemispheres differs by more than 1 W m 22 , indicating that the observed climate system exhibits hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance but not in longwave irradiance. The authors devise a variety of methods to estimate the spatial degrees of freedom of the time-mean reflected shortwave irradiance. These are used to show that the hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance is a nontrivial property of the Earth system in the sense that most partitionings of Earth into two random halves do not exhibit hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance. Climate models generally do not reproduce the observed hemispheric symmetry, which the authors interpret as further evidence that the symmetry is nontrivial. While the authors cannot rule out that the observed hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance is accidental, their results motivate a search for mechanisms that minimize hemispheric differences in reflected shortwave irradiance and planetary albedo.

Northern-hemispheric differential warming is the key to understanding the discrepancies in the projected Sahel rainfall

Future projections of the Sahel rainfall are highly uncertain, with different climate models showing widely differing rainfall trends. Moreover, the twentieth-century cross-model consensus linking Sahel rainfall to tropical sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) is no longer applicable in the twenty-first century. Here we show that the diverse future Northern Hemisphere differential warming between extratropical and tropical SSTs can explain the discrepancy in the projected Sahel rainfall. The relationship between SST and Sahel rainfall that holds for the twentieth-century persists into the twenty-first century when the differential SST warming is taken into account. A suite of SST-sensitivity experiments confirms that strong Northern Hemisphere extratropical warming induces a significant increase in Sahel rainfall, which can predominate over the drying impact of tropical SST warming. These results indicate that a trustworthy projection of Sahel rainfall requires the estimation of the most likely future Northern-hemispheric differential warming.

Impact of observed North Atlantic multidecadal variations to European summer climate: a linear baroclinic response to surface heating

The observed prominent multidecadal variations in the central to eastern (C–E) European summer temperature are closely related to the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV). Using the Twentieth Century Reanalysis project version 2 data for the period of 1930–2012, we present a mechanism by which the multidecadal variations in the C–E European summer temperature are associated to a linear baroclinic atmospheric response to the AMV-related surface heat flux. Our results suggest that over the north-western Atlantic, the positive heat flux anomaly triggers a surface baroclinic pressure response to diabatic heating with a negative surface pressure anomaly to the east of the heat source. Further downstream, this response induces an east-west wave-like pressure anomaly. The east-west wave-like response in the sea level pressure structure, to which we refer as North-Atlantic-European East West (NEW) mode, is independent of the summer North Atlantic Oscillation and is the principal mode of variations during summer over the Euro-Atlantic region at multidecadal time scales. The NEW mode causes warming of the C–E European region by creating an atmospheric blocking-like situation. Our findings also suggest that this NEW mode is responsible for the multidecadal variations in precipitation over the British Isles and north-western Europe.

Sea-ice anomalies in the Sea of Okhotsk and the relationship with storm tracks in the Northern Hemisphere during winter

Previous studies have shown that sea-ice in the Sea of Okhotsk can be affected by local storms; in turn, the resultant sea-ice changes can affect the downstream development of storm tracks in the Pacific and possibly dampen a pre-existing North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) signal in late winter. In this paper, a storm tracking algorithm was applied to the six hourly horizontal winds from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data from 1978(9) to 2007 and output from the atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) ECHAM5 forced by sea-ice anomalies in the Sea of Okhotsk. The life cycle response of storms to sea-ice anomalies is investigated using various aspects of storm activity—cyclone genesis, lysis, intensity and track density. Results show that, for enhanced positive sea-ice concentrations in the Sea of Okhotsk, there is a decrease in secondary cyclogenesis, a westward shift in cyclolysis and changes in the subtropical jet are seen in the North Pacific. In the Atlantic, a pattern resembling the negative phase of the NAO is observed. This pattern is confirmed by the AGCM ECHAM5 experiments driven with above normal sea-ice anomalies in the Sea of Okhotsk.

Climate science: The origin of regional Arctic warming.

Observational data and modelling show that the rapid warming of the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic over the past three decades has been strongly driven by cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean. See Letter p.209 Greenland and northeastern Canada experienced some of the most rapid warming of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with human-induced climate change usually assumed to be in play. Qinghua Ding et al. show that about half of the observed warming can be attributed to changes in sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific Ocean which in turn influence the large-scale atmospheric circulation that moves warm air from the tropics to Greenland and northeastern Canada. Further research will be needed to establish whether or not the Pacific changes themselves are a response to the effects of human activity on the climate system.

Impact of tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperature biases on the simulated atmospheric circulation and precipitation over the Atlantic region: An ECHAM6 model study

As many coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, the coupled Earth System Model developed at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology suffers from severe sea-surface temperature (SST) biases in the tropical Atlantic. We performed a set of SST sensitivity experiments with its atmospheric model component ECHAM6 to understand the impact of tropical Atlantic SST biases on atmospheric circulation and precipitation. The model was forced by a climatology of observed global SSTs to focus on simulated seasonal and annual mean state climate. Through the superposition of varying tropical Atlantic bias patterns extracted from the MPI-ESM on top of the control field, this study investigates the relevance of the seasonal variation and spatial structure of tropical Atlantic biases for the simulated response. Results show that the position and structure of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) across the Atlantic is significantly affected, exhibiting a dynamically forced shift of annual mean precipitation maximum to the east of the Atlantic basin as well as a southward shift of the oceanic rain belt. The SST-induced changes in the ITCZ in turn affect seasonal rainfall over adjacent continents. However not only the ITCZ position but also other effects arising from biases in tropical Atlantic SSTs, e.g. variations in the wind field, change the simulation of precipitation over land. The seasonal variation and spatial pattern of tropical Atlantic SST biases turns out to be crucial for the simulated atmospheric response and is essential for analyzing the contribution of SST biases to coupled model mean state biases. Our experiments show that MPI-ESM mean-state biases in the Atlantic sector are mainly driven by SST biases in the tropical Atlantic while teleconnections from other basins seem to play a minor role.