Climate Letter #2053

Why atmospheric river (AR) research is very concerning. I have been writing these letters for over eight years now, always looking for new information coming out of the many different fields of basic climate research. I must admit that AR research has never been high on my to-do list, in part because of a scarcity of headlines in either media stories about events or the regular sources of reports about newly-issued studies in general. Now I am a little more awake to the AR work that has been going on, sort of under the radar, which means playing catch-up and at the same time trying to figure out all the implications that are introduced therein. At this point the implications—as they initially appear—loom far larger than I ever thought possible, which I will start describing today. There are two main reasons for concern. First, just as I have always suspected, the researchers doing these studies never show the slightest bit of interest in the idea that ARs may be carriers of greenhouse energy effects as well as basic sources of precipitation. The entire focus is on flooding and other precipitation impacts.

Second, I am just now learning about the depth and far-reaching extent of the research these folks have been doing. They have been setting up models that look far into the future, over many decades and under a variety of different scenarios, in search of clues about what ARs will be like in the future. The results all seem to point toward considerable expansion of “integrated water vapor transport” (IVT) for ARs in all places, plus increased frequency in some important places, but not everywhere. The projected IVT increases that I see look like they will be higher than the expected rates of CO2 increases in various scenarios, which I think is very interesting, but I have no way of evaluating the accuracy of the models. What I do know is that computerized meteorology forecasting has been remarkably improved in recent years with respect to daily, weekly and 10-day forecasts, which suggests that practitioners have some developed some real skills of a practical nature, and these skills may be extendable into the longer term. Anyway, ordinary climate scientists who build models covering a much broader range of climatory effects should not be reluctant about incorporating the results of meteorological models if they prove to be in tune with best practices elsewhere.

To help you get updated on the content of this research, I would suggest that you first open the link to a 2018 study that is firmly established as a benchmark and is completely accessible to everyone: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2017GL076968.  It is full of projections as well as methodology.  The references at the end probably call up practically everything of maximum value in this specialty field from earlier dates.  The 98 citations complete the picture by most likely including almost everything of value about ARs that has been published in the last 30 months.  It’s all worth spending some time on, but then save a little more time for browsing through a report from NASA.’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published in June of 2018, detailing the current state of research related to the formation and impacts of ARs on a global scale.  Projected increases are foreseen well into the current century, which are taken as indications of climate change, but not as climate change in the sense we are accustomed to hearing about.  There is no reference to any kind of effect on temperatures, which I think broadly substantiates the claim I made at the beginning about the absence of any link between the PW content of ARs and greenhouse energy effects.  The meteorologists appear to be leaving a determination of that possibility up to the more broad-based models of climate scientists who are not so specialized.

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So where does that leave us?  What should we expect to hear from climate scientists at large?  Are they worried by the prospect that substantial amounts of PW may well be flying through the atmosphere high over our heads before long, more than ever before, in the form of rivers or streams that come and go in a mostly irregular way?  I’ve seen no indications to that effect, and I doubt that any of them have been reading my Climate Letters, or taking a close look at what the Weather Maps keep telling us.  In yesterday’s letter I showed you the basic procedure that I follow in sorting out the information contained in the maps, so occurrences of one type can be compared with occurrences of another type in any one place on any one day.  There are more things one needs to be aware of for best results, but It is never a difficult thing to do, if one has a little time and patience available plus whatever basic cognitive skills are required for map or chart reading and comparing in general. There is not much to it, and the results I’ve seen are often amazing.  Regardless of its makeup, the total amount of PW in a vertical column of air to the top of the atmosphere has a powerful greenhouse effect at the surface, expressed logarithmically in terms of relative differences in weight.  The analysis is unequivocal.  When AR content grows, so do related temperatures. There is even more to this story, adding more concerns, as fully explored in earlier letters, but this is it for today.  

Carl

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