Philip J. Pegion

MERRA: NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications

AbstractThe Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) was undertaken by NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office with two primary objectives: to place observations from NASA’s Earth Observing System satellites into a climate context and to improve upon the hydrologic cycle represented in earlier generations of reanalyses. Focusing on the satellite era, from 1979 to the present, MERRA has achieved its goals with significant improvements in precipitation and water vapor climatology. Here, a brief overview of the system and some aspects of its performance, including quality assessment diagnostics from innovation and residual statistics, is given.By comparing MERRA with other updated reanalyses [the interim version of the next ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim) and the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR)], advances made in this new generation of reanalyses, as well as remaining deficiencies, are identified. Although there is little difference between the new reanalyses i...

On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl

During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains. In this study, we present model results that indicate that the drought was caused by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures during that decade and that interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface increased its severity. We also contrast the 1930s drought with other North American droughts of the 20th century.

On the Increased Frequency of Mediterranean Drought

AbstractThe land area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea has experienced 10 of the 12 driest winters since 1902 in just the last 20 years. A change in wintertime Mediterranean precipitation toward drier conditions has likely occurred over 1902–2010 whose magnitude cannot be reconciled with internal variability alone. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosol forcing are key attributable factors for this increased drying, though the external signal explains only half of the drying magnitude. Furthermore, sea surface temperature (SST) forcing during 1902–2010 likely played an important role in the observed Mediterranean drying, and the externally forced drying signal likely also occurs through an SST change signal.The observed wintertime Mediterranean drying over the last century can be understood in a simple framework of the region’s sensitivity to a uniform global ocean warming and to modest changes in the ocean’s zonal and meridional SST gradients. Climate models subjected to a uniform +0.5°C warming of th...

Anatomy of an Extreme Event

AbstractThe record-setting 2011 Texas drought/heat wave is examined to identify physical processes, underlying causes, and predictability. October 2010–September 2011 was Texas’s driest 12-month period on record. While the summer 2011 heat wave magnitude (2.9°C above the 1981–2010 mean) was larger than the previous record, events of similar or larger magnitude appear in preindustrial control runs of climate models. The principal factor contributing to the heat wave magnitude was a severe rainfall deficit during antecedent and concurrent seasons related to anomalous sea surface temperatures (SSTs) that included a La Nina event. Virtually all the precipitation deficits appear to be due to natural variability. About 0.6°C warming relative to the 1981–2010 mean is estimated to be attributable to human-induced climate change, with warming observed mainly in the past decade. Quantitative attribution of the overall human-induced contribution since preindustrial times is complicated by the lack of a detected cent...

Attribution of the Seasonality and Regionality in Climate Trends over the United States during 1950–2000

Abstract The observed climate trends over the United States during 1950–2000 exhibit distinct seasonality and regionality. The surface air temperature exhibits a warming trend during winter, spring, and early summer and a modest countrywide cooling trend in late summer and fall, with the strongest warming occurring over the northern United States in spring. Precipitation trends are positive in all seasons, with the largest trend occurring over the central and southern United States in fall. This study investigates the causes of the seasonality and regionality of those trends, with a focus on the cooling and wetting trends in the central United States during late summer and fall. In particular, the authors examine the link between the seasonality and regionality of the climate trends over the United States and the leading patterns of sea surface temperature (SST) variability, including a global warming (GW) pattern and a Pacific decadal variability (PDV) pattern. A series of idealized atmospheric general c...

Understanding recent eastern Horn of Africa rainfall variability and change

AbstractObservations and sea surface temperature (SST)-forced ECHAM5 simulations are examined to study the seasonal cycle of eastern Africa rainfall and its SST sensitivity during 1979–2012, focusing on interannual variability and trends. The eastern Horn is drier than the rest of equatorial Africa, with two distinct wet seasons, and whereas the October–December wet season has become wetter, the March–May season has become drier.The climatological rainfall in simulations driven by observed SSTs captures this bimodal regime. The simulated trends also qualitatively reproduce the opposite-sign changes in the two rainy seasons, suggesting that SST forcing has played an important role in the observed changes. The consistency between the sign of 1979–2012 trends and interannual SST–precipitation correlations is exploited to identify the most likely locations of SST forcing of precipitation trends in the model, and conceivably also in nature. Results indicate that the observed March–May drying since 1979 is due ...

Regional and Global Impacts of Land Cover Change and Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies

The atmospheric and land components of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratorys (GFDLs) Cli- mate Model version 2.1 (CM2.1) is used with climatological sea surface temperatures (SSTs) to investigate the relative climatic impacts of historical anthropogenic land cover change (LCC) and realistic SST anom- alies. The SST forcing anomalies used are analogous to signals induced by El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the background global warming trend. Coherent areas of LCC are represented throughout much of central and eastern Europe, northern India, southeastern China, and on either side of the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains in North America. Smaller areas of change are present in various tropical regions. The land cover changes in the model are almost exclusively a conversion of forests to grasslands. Model results show that, at the global scale, the physical impacts of LCC on temperature and rainfall are less important than large-scale SST anomalies, particularly those due to ENSO. However, in the regions where the land surface has been altered, the impact of LCC can be equally or more important than the SST forcing patterns in determining the seasonal cycle of the surface water and energy balance. Thus, this work provides a context for the impacts of LCC on climate: namely, strong regional-scale impacts that can sig- nificantly change globally averaged fields but that rarely propagate beyond the disturbed regions. This suggests that proper representation of land cover conditions is essential in the design of climate model experiments, particularly if results are to be used for regional-scale assessments of climate change impacts.

ENSO and Wintertime Extreme Precipitation Events over the Contiguous United States

Abstract In this study the authors examine the impact of El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on precipitation events over the continental United States using 49 winters (1949/50–1997/98) of daily precipitation observations and NCEP–NCAR reanalyses. The results are compared with those from an ensemble of nine atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) simulations forced with observed SST for the same time period. Empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of the daily precipitation fields together with compositing techniques are used to identify and characterize the weather systems that dominate the winter precipitation variability. The time series of the principal components (PCs) associated with the leading EOFs are analyzed using generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions to quantify the impact of ENSO on the intensity of extreme precipitation events. The six leading EOFs of the observations are associated with major winter storm systems and account for more than 50% of the daily precipitation variabili...

Potential Predictability of Long-Term Drought and Pluvial Conditions in the U.S. Great Plains

Abstract This study examines the predictability of seasonal mean Great Plains precipitation using an ensemble of century-long atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) simulations forced with observed sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The results show that the predictability (intraensemble spread) of the precipitation response to SST forcing varies on interannual and longer time scales. In particular, this study finds that pluvial conditions are more predictable (have less intraensemble spread) than drought conditions. This rather unexpected result is examined in the context of the physical mechanisms that impact precipitation in the Great Plains. These mechanisms include El Nino–Southern Oscillation’s impact on the planetary waves and hence the Pacific storm track (primarily during the cold season), the role of Atlantic SSTs in forcing changes in the Bermuda high and low-level moisture flux into the continent (primarily during the warm season), and soil moisture feedbacks (primarily during the warm sea...

African Easterly Jet: Structure and Maintenance

Abstract This article investigates the African easterly jet (AEJ), its structure, and the forcings contributing to its maintenance, critically revisiting previous work that attributed the maintenance of the jet to soil moisture gradients over tropical Africa. A state-of-the-art global model in a high-end computer framework is used to produce a three-member 73-yr ensemble run forced by observed SST to represent the control run. The AEJ as produced by the control is compared with the representation of the AEJ in the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) and other observational datasets and found to be very realistic. Five experiments are then performed, each represented by sets of three-member 22-yr-long (1980–2001) ensemble runs. The goal of the experiments is to investigate the role of meridional soil moisture gradients, different land surface properties, and orography. Unlike previous studies, which have suppressed soil moisture gradients within a highly idealized framework (i.e., the so-called bucket model),...