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Great Plains Hydroclimate Variability: The View from North American Regional Reanalysis

Great Plains Hydroclimate Variability: The View from North American Regional Reanalysis Interannual variability of warm-season rainfall over the Great Plains is analyzed using the recently released North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). The new dataset differs from its global counterparts in the additional assimilation of precipitation and radiances. This along with the use of a more comprehensive land surface model in generation of NARR offers the prospect of obtaining improved estimates of surface hydrologic and near-surface meteorological fields. NARR’s representation of hydroclimate is used to weigh in on the authors’ recent finding of the dominance of large-scale moisture flux convergence over evaporation in accounting for Great Plains precipitation variations. Evaporation estimates are notoriously uncertain and, while the NARR ones are not assured to be realistic, they are more constrained than those diagnosed before from inline and offline assessments. NARR’s portrayal of warm-season hydroclimate variability corroborates the importance of remote water sources in generation of Great Plains precipitation variability and supports the authors’ claim that some state-of-the-art atmosphere/land surface models vigorously recycle precipitation, erroneously, at least in context of Great Plains interannual variability. These very models have been key to recent claims of strong coupling between soil moisture and precipitation. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Climate American Meteorological Society

Great Plains Hydroclimate Variability: The View from North American Regional Reanalysis

Ruiz-Barradas, Alfredo; Nigam, Sumant
Journal of Climate , Volume 19 (12) – Apr 4, 2005
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Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 American Meteorological Society
ISSN
1520-0442
DOI
10.1175/JCLI3768.1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Interannual variability of warm-season rainfall over the Great Plains is analyzed using the recently released North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). The new dataset differs from its global counterparts in the additional assimilation of precipitation and radiances. This along with the use of a more comprehensive land surface model in generation of NARR offers the prospect of obtaining improved estimates of surface hydrologic and near-surface meteorological fields. NARR’s representation of hydroclimate is used to weigh in on the authors’ recent finding of the dominance of large-scale moisture flux convergence over evaporation in accounting for Great Plains precipitation variations. Evaporation estimates are notoriously uncertain and, while the NARR ones are not assured to be realistic, they are more constrained than those diagnosed before from inline and offline assessments. NARR’s portrayal of warm-season hydroclimate variability corroborates the importance of remote water sources in generation of Great Plains precipitation variability and supports the authors’ claim that some state-of-the-art atmosphere/land surface models vigorously recycle precipitation, erroneously, at least in context of Great Plains interannual variability. These very models have been key to recent claims of strong coupling between soil moisture and precipitation.

Journal

Journal of Climate – American Meteorological Society

Published: Apr 4, 2005

References

  • A 36-yr climatological description of the evaporative sources of warm-season precipitation in the Mississippi River basin.
    Brubaker
  • Global precipitation and thunderstorm frequencies. Part I: Seasonal and interannual variations.
    Dai