A research team led by academician Wu Lixin from the Frontiers Science Center for Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System and the Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography under the Chinese Ministry of Education has made significant progress in extreme weather and climate change research. Using a vortex resolution climate model to evaluate changes in extreme atmospheric river events under future warming scenarios on a global scale, the team has attained innovative results. The research, entitled “Extreme Atmospheric Rivers in a Warming Climate”, was published online in Nature Communications on June 3.
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow, strong water vapor transport belts at mid-latitude weather scales and are a major source of extreme precipitation and flood disasters. According to previous studies, there is a consensus in academia that future AR events will occur more frequently under global warming scenarios. The premise to accurately predict future ARs under a warming climate is to accurately capture ARs in climate models. The research team found that existing non-eddy-resolving climate models seriously underestimate the occurrence of extreme AR events (by about 50%). This suggests that there is a great deal of uncertainty in the response of extreme ARs under global warming scenarios. The eddy-resolving CESM model greatly corrected the simulation deviation of extreme ARs. Based on the high-resolution CESM results, the study shows that future extreme AR events will increase in an almost linear manner with temperature. Under strong warming scenarios, the total water vapor transport and precipitation related to extreme AR events will at least double globally by the end of the 21st century, and the number of extreme AR events will increase by about three times. In addition, the study further shows that under future global warming scenarios, the coupling relationship between ARs and subtropical cyclones will weaken, thereby affecting the short-term prediction of ARs.
