Marta Vázquez

Atmospheric rivers: a mini-review

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow regions responsible for the majority of the poleward water vapour transport across the midlatitudes. They are characterized by high water vapour content and strong low level winds, and form a part of the broader warm conveyor belt of extratropical cyclones. Although the meridional water vapour transport within ARs is critical for water resources, ARs can also cause disastrous floods especially when encountering mountainous terrain. They were labelled as atmospheric rivers in the 1990s, and have since become a well-studied feature of the midlatitude climate. We briefly review the conceptual model, the methods used to identify them, their main climatological characteristics, their impacts, the predictive ability of numerical weather prediction models, their relationship with large-scale ocean-atmosphere dynamics, possible changes under future climates, and some future challenges.

Arctic moisture source for Eurasian snow cover variations in autumn

Eurasian fall snow cover changes have been suggested as a driver for changes in the Arctic Oscillation and might provide a link between sea-ice decline in the Arctic during summer and atmospheric circulation in the following winter. However, the mechanism connecting snow cover in Eurasia to sea-ice decline in autumn is still under debate. Our analysis is based on snow observations from 820 Russian land stations, moisture transport using a Lagrangian approach derived from meteorological re-analyses. We show that declining sea-ice in the Barents and Kara Seas (BKS) acts as moisture source for the enhanced Western Siberian snow depth as a result of changed tropospheric moisture transport. Transient disturbances enter the continent from the BKS region related to anomalies in the planetary wave pattern and move southward along the Ural mountains where they merge into the extension of the Mediterranean storm track.

Moisture transport into the Arctic: Source-receptor relationships and the roles of atmospheric circulation and evaporation

Hydrological processes play a key role in the Arctic, as well as being an important part of the response of this region to climate change. The origin of the moisture arriving (and then precipitating) in the Arctic is a crucial question in our understanding of the Arctic hydrological cycle. In an attempt to answer this, the present study uses the Lagrangian diagnosis model FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model) to localize the main sources of moisture for the Arctic region, to analyze their variability and their contribution to precipitation, and to consider the implications of any changes in the transport of moisture from particular sources within the system. From this analysis, four major moisture sources appear as the most important moisture supplies into the system: the subtropical and southern extratropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, North America, and Siberia. Oceanic sources play an important role throughout the year, whereas continental ones only take effect in summer. The sink areas associated with each source have been shown to be moderately influenced by changes in atmospheric circulation, mainly associated with the East Atlantic pattern for the Atlantic source and related to West Pacific and Pacific/North American (PNA) teleconnection patterns for the Pacific one. On the other hand, the variability over the sinks does not seem to be significantly related to changes in evaporation at an interannual scale.