Despite 30 years of basin-wide nutrient-reduction efforts, severe hypoxia continues to be observed in the Chesapeake Bay. Here we demonstrate the critical influence of climate variability, interacting with accumulated nitrogen (N) over multidecades, on Susquehanna River dissolved nitrogen (DN) loads, known precursors of the hypoxia in the Bay. We used the process model LM3-TAN (Terrestrial and Aquatic Nitrogen), which is capable of capturing both seasonal and decadal-to-century changes in vegetation-soil-river N storage, and produced nine scenarios of DN-load distributions under different short-term scenarios of climate variability and extremes. We illustrate that after 1 to 3 yearlong dry spells, the likelihood of exceeding a threshold DN load (56 kt yr−1) increases by 40 to 65% due to flushing of N accumulated throughout the dry spells and altered microbial processes. Our analyses suggest that possible future increases in climate variability/extremes—specifically, high precipitation occurring after multiyear dry spells—could likely lead to high DN-load anomalies and hypoxia.
2020 | Journal of Climate, 33(17), 7275-7287, 2020
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Monsoon low pressure systems (MLPSs) are among the most important synoptic-scale disturbances of the South Asian summer monsoon. Potential changes in ...
2016 | J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf., 121, 497– 510
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Satellite laser altimetry reveals short timescale changes in Antarctic ice sheet surface elevation that are suggested to be driven by subglacial water...
Icebergs calved from the Antarctic continent act as moving sources of freshwater while drifting in the Southern Ocean. The lifespan of these icebergs ...
Extracting multiple-scale observational information is critical for accurately reconstructing the structure of mesoscale circulation systems such as t...
Arid extratropical Asia (AEA) is bisected at the wetter Tian Shan (a northern offshoot of the Tibetan Plateau) into east and west deserts, each with u...
Uncertainty in equilibrium climate sensitivity impedes accurate climate projections. While the intermodel spread is known to arise primarily from diff...
High-latitude phytoplankton blooms support productive fisheries and play an important role in oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the sub...
We examine how soil moisture variability and trends affect the simulation of temperature and precipitation extremes in six global climate models using...
Sea surface cooling along tropical cyclone (TC) tracks has been well observed, but a complete understanding of the full three-dimensional structure of...
2020 | Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 12, e2019MS002026.
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The imprint of anthropogenic activities on the marine nitrogen (N) cycle remains challenging to represent in global models, in part because of uncerta...
The preferential dust source (PDS) scheme enables large-scale mapping of geomorphology in terms of importance for dust emissions but has not been inde...
Recently, there has been considerable interest in examining how sea-level extremes due to storm surge may be related to climate change. Evidence of ho...
2021 | Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 102(1), S1-S7.
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July 2019 saw record-breaking wildfires burning 3,600 km2 in Alaska. The GFDL Earth system model indicates a threefold increased risk of Alaska’s ex...
Potential and real predictive skill of the frequency of extreme rainfall in southeastern South America for the December–February season are evaluate...
In August 2010, a 253 km2 ice island calved from the floating glacial tongue of Petermann Glacier in Northwest Greenland. Petermann Ice Island (PII)-B...
This study investigates the roles of radiative forcing, sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and atmospheric and land initial conditions in the summer war...
The canonical relationship between the length and the total seasonal rainfall anomalies of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) is the association of the l...