O’Brien TA, Wehner MF, Payne AE, Shields CA, Rutz JJ, Leung L, Ralph FM, Collow A, Gorodetskaya I, Guan B, Lora JM, McClenny E, Nardi KM, Ramos AM, Tomé R, Sarangi C, Shearer EJ, Ullrich PA, Zarzycki C, Loring B, Huang H, Inda‐Díaz HA, Rhoades AM, Zhou Y. Increases in Future AR Count and Size: Overview of the ARTMIP Tier 2 CMIP5/6 Experiment.
J Geophys Res Atmos 2022;
127:e2021JD036013. [PMID:
35859545 PMCID:
PMC9285484 DOI:
10.1029/2021jd036013]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/08/2021] [Revised: 12/14/2021] [Accepted: 12/15/2021] [Indexed: 06/15/2023]
Abstract
The Atmospheric River (AR) Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP) is a community effort to systematically assess how the uncertainties from AR detectors (ARDTs) impact our scientific understanding of ARs. This study describes the ARTMIP Tier 2 experimental design and initial results using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) Phases 5 and 6 multi-model ensembles. We show that AR statistics from a given ARDT in CMIP5/6 historical simulations compare remarkably well with the MERRA-2 reanalysis. In CMIP5/6 future simulations, most ARDTs project a global increase in AR frequency, counts, and sizes, especially along the western coastlines of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We find that the choice of ARDT is the dominant contributor to the uncertainty in projected AR frequency when compared with model choice. These results imply that new projects investigating future changes in ARs should explicitly consider ARDT uncertainty as a core part of the experimental design.
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