The biggest winter storm of 2016 named “Jonas” over the eastern United States hit the mid-Atlantic states around 23 January, dumping up to 1 m of snow from Virginia to New York (Fig. 11.1a), inflicting around $1 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages and causing 55 fatalities. This motivated our exploratory inquiry about how heavy winter precipitation events overall, and heavy snowstorms in particular, have changed in the mid-Atlantic region due to long-term climate change. In the eastern United States, heavy rain- and snowstorms have become more frequent during recent decades (Kunkel et al. 2013; Lawrimore et al. 2014). Both El Niño (Smith and O’Brien 2001; Lawrimore et al. 2014) and the negative phase of the NAO (Hoerling et al. 2010; Seager et al. 2010) increase the odds of heavy snow in this region. Given these natural drivers to-gether with the regional rarity of major snowstorms (Changnon et al. 2006), identifying human-induced contributions requires model experimentation, results of which are presented here to augment empirical diagnosis of historical data.
The U.S. National Blend of Models provides statistically postprocessed, high-resolution multimodel ensemble guidance, providing National Weather Servi...
Southern Africa precipitation during December–March (DJFM), the height of the rainy season, is closely related with two modes of climate variability...
Aircraft dropsonde observations provide the most comprehensive measurements to date of horizontal water vapor transport in atmospheric rivers (ARs). T...
Record-breaking extreme storms were a hallmark of 2017 in the United States. An extremely wet winter on the West Coast and brutally damaging hurricane...
This is a story of two extreme events—one that was expected but failed to occur and the other that actually did occur but was not anticipated. The o...
Salt marshes provide valuable services, such as protecting the coastfrom storms, removing excess nutrient pollution from water, and long‐term burial...
Greenland Ice Sheet surface temperatures are controlled by an exchange of energy at the surface, which includes radiative, turbulent, and ground heat ...
Earlier studies of spatial variability in sea surface temperature (SST) using ship-based radiometric data suggested that variability at scales smaller...
Salt marsh ecosystems rely on carbon accumulation to increaseelevation and survive sea level rise. The amount of carbon accumulated in a marsh is the ...
Polarimetric radar measurements and products perform as the cornerstones of modern severe weather warning and nowcast systems. Two radar quantitative ...
The partitioning of precipitation into frozen and liquid components influences snow-derived water resources and flood hazards in mountain environments...
Observations of turbulence in the planetary boundary layer are critical for developing and evaluating boundary layer parameterizations in mesoscale nu...
During the eXperimental Planetary boundary layer Instrumentation Assessment (XPIA) campaign, which was carried out at the Boulder Atmospheric Observat...
2017 | Geophysical Research Letters 44(7): 3184-3192, 2017
Description:
The recent multiyear drought over California was characterized by large precipitation deficits and abnormally high temperatures during both wet and dr...
To gain a more complete observational understanding of atmospheric rivers (ARs) over the data-sparse open ocean, a diverse suite of mobile observing p...
This study aims to address hydrological processes and impacts of an atmospheric river (AR) event that occurred during 15–18 February 2004 in the Rus...
This year’s report includes climate change attribution assessments of seventeen different extreme events from around the world dur-ing 2017 (Table S...
Severe convective storms are hazardous to both life and property and thus their accurate and timely prediction is imperative. In response to this crit...
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