Workshop on Indices and Indicators for Climate Extremes, Asheville, NC, USA, 3–6 June 1997 Breakout Group C: Temperature Indices for Climate Extremes

The "temperature" breakout group at the 1997 Asheville Workshop on Indicators and Indices for Climate Extremes reviewed and developed the rationale for a choice of temperature indices for monitoring changes in climate extremes, and the supporting data required. A set of basic and supplementary key indices was drawn up. The key indices are meant to be easy to interpret, be relevant to the practical concerns of policy makers and others in the public sector and provide potential inputs into the Third Assessment Review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is expected to report in 2001. The indices are expressed in various ways to facilitate spatial and temporal trend detection and impact analysis. There is flexibility in the number and the form of the indices identified and the choice for any particular application is subject to further analysis and prioritization. The success of this endeavor will depend on original work being done to further develop the indices and on the cooperation of organizations globally to provide the data necessary for the development and the implementation of the indices. This paper summarizes the group's recommendations.     

Workshop on Indices and Indicators for Climate Extremes, Asheville, NC, USA, 3–6 June 1997 Breakout Group A: Storms

The Working Group on Storms considered tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones, thunderstorms and their associated winds and effects other than on temperatures and precipitation (which are dealt with by the other working groups) to be in their purview. Changes in observing systems and distribution of observers and people impacted by these phenomena confound trend analysis. In light of the difficulty of assembling homogeneous time series of small-scale phenomena such as thunderstorms, tornadoes and hail, and also the problems in wind measurements, the working group recommends that indices of wind be developed by taking advantage of long surface (or sea-level) pressure measurements and analyses. Because wind is a vector, two pairs of readings that are orthogonal are desirable. Instantaneous values over about 1000 km scales are desirable to generate statistics relevant to wind extremes. Recommendations are given on how the data might profitably be processed. Several other recommendations are made concerning data acquisition and processing, some of which apply to reanalysis of past data and some apply to future processing of data. Various "extremes indices" are also suggested.     

Climate Change on Newfoundland and Labrador Shelves: Results From a Regional Downscaled Ocean and Sea-Ice Model Under an A1B Forcing Scenario 2011–2069

Climate change may affect ocean and ice conditions in coastal oceans and thus have significant impacts on coastal infrastructure, marine navigation, and marine ecosystems. In this study a three-dimensional ice–ocean model is developed to examine likely changes of ocean and ice conditions over the Newfoundland and Labrador Shelves in response to climate change. The model is configured with a horizontal grid of approximately 7?km and a vertical grid of 46 levels and is run from 1979 to 2069. The projection period is 2011 to 2069 under a median emission scenario A1B used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For the projection period, the surface atmospheric forcing fields used are from the Canadian Regional Climate Model over the North Atlantic. The open boundary conditions come from the Canadian Global Climate Model, Version 3 (CGCM3), adjusted for the 1981–2010 mean of the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation model output. The simulated fields over the 1981–2010 period have patterns consistent with observations. Over the Newfoundland and Labrador Shelves during the projection period, the model shows general trends of warming, freshening, and decreasing ice. From 2011 to 2069, the model projects that under A1B sea surface temperature will increase by 1.4°C; bottom temperature will increase by 1.6°C; sea surface salinity will decrease by 0.7; bottom salinity will decrease by 0.3; and sea-ice extent will decrease by 70%. The sea level will rise by 0.11?m at the St. John's tide-gauge station because of oceanographic change, and the freshwater transport of the Labrador Current will double as a result of freshening. The regional ice–ocean model reproduces more realistic present climate conditions and projects considerably different future climate conditions than CGCM3.     

“Reporting on climate change: A computational analysis of U.S. newspapers and sources of bias, 1997–2017”

News organizations constitute key sites of science communication between experts and lay audiences, giving many individuals their basic worldview of complex topics like climate change. Previous researchers have studied climate change news coverage to assess accuracy in reporting and potential sources of bias. These studies typically rely on manually coding articles from a handful of prestigious outlets, not allowing comparisons with smaller newspapers or providing enough diversity to assess the influence of partisan orientation or localized climate vulnerability on content production. Making these comparisons, this study indicates that partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and vulnerability to climate change correlate with several topics present in U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change. After assembling a corpus of over 78,000 articles covering two decades from 52 U.S. newspapers that are diverse in terms of geography, partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and objectively measured climate risk, a coherent set of latent topics were identified via an automated content analysis of climate change news coverage. Topic model results indicate that while outlet bias does not appear to impact the prevalence of coverage for most topics surrounding climate change, differences were evident for some topics based on partisan orientation, scale, or vulnerability status, particularly those relating to climate change denial, impacts, mitigation, or resource use. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive study of U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change and identifies specific topics where outlet bias constitutes an important contextual factor.     

Downscaled simulations of the ECHAM5, CCSM3 and HadCM3 global models for the eastern Mediterranean–Black Sea region: evaluation of the reference period

The outputs of three GCMs, ECHAM5, CCSM3 and HadCM3, are downscaled for the eastern Mediterranean–Black Sea region for the period 1961–1990 using a regional climate model, RegCM3, to assess the capability of these models in simulating the climatology of the region. In addition, the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data are also downscaled for the same period to display the performance of the regional climate model for the same region, which constitutes a relatively complex terrain and rich variety of climates. The gridded observational dataset of CRU is primarily used in the evaluation of the models, however, a regional dataset, which is based on a relatively dense gauging network, is also used to see how it affects the performance measures of the models. The reanalysis simulation indicates that RegCM3 is able to simulate the precipitation and surface temperature as well as the upper level fields reasonably well. However, it tends to overestimate the precipitation over the mountainous areas. All three GCM models are found to be highly skilled in simulating the winter precipitation and temperature in the region. The two models, ECHAM5 and HadCM3, are also good at simulating the summer precipitation and temperature, but the CCSM3 simulation generates dryer and warmer conditions than the observations for the whole region, which are most likely a result of the dryness in the upper levels of the original outputs. The use of the regional observational dataset does not necessarily improve the pattern correlations, but it yields better match between the modeled and observed precipitation in terms of variability and root-mean-square difference. It could be said that the outputs of these GCMs can be used in the climate change downscaling and impact assessment studies for the region, given that their strengths and weaknesses that are displayed in the present study are considered.     

Forward–backward scheme on the B/E grid modified to suppress lattice separation: the two versions, and any impact of the choice made?

Ever since its introduction to meteorology in the early 1970s, the forward–backward scheme has proven to be a very efficient method of treating gravity waves, with an added bonus of avoiding the time computational mode of the leapfrog scheme. It has been and it is used today in a number of models. When used on a square grid other than the Arakawa C grid, modification is or modifications are available to suppress the noise-generating separation of solutions on elementary C grids. Yet, in spite of a number of papers addressing the scheme and its modification, or modifications, issues remain that have either not been addressed or have been commented upon in a misleading or even in an incorrect way. Specifically, restricting ourselves to the B/E grid does it matter and if so how which of the two equations, momentum and the continuity equation, is integrated forward? Is there just one modification suppressing the separation of solutions, or have there been proposed two modification schemes? Questions made are addressed and a number of misleading statements made are recalled and commented upon. In particular, it is demonstrated that there is no added computational cost in integrating the momentum equation forward, and it is pointed out that this would seem advantageous given the height perturbations excited in the first step following a perturbation at a single height point. Yet, 48-h numerical experiments with a full-physics model show only a barely visible difference between the forecasts done using one and the other equation forward.     

Comment on “Kinetics of the reactions of Cl atoms with 2-buten-1-ol, 2-methyl-2-propen-1-ol, and 3-methyl-2-buten-1-ol as a function of temperature” by Rodriguez et al. (J. Atmos. Chem. (2008) 59:187–197)

The Arrhenius expressions and the data plotted in Figure 2 of Rodriguez et al. 2008 give rate coefficients of approximately 2?×?10^-8 cm³ molecule^-1 s^-1 at 255 K. Such values are approximately two orders of magnitude larger than expected from simple collision theory (Finlayson-Pitts and Pitts 1986). The rate coefficients reported at sub-ambient temperatures are substantially greater than the gas kinetic limit and are not physically plausible. The rate coefficients reported by Rodriguez et al. imply a long range attraction between the reactants which is not reasonable for reaction of neutral species such as chlorine atoms and unsaturated alcohols. We also note that the pre-exponential A factors (10^-23-10^-20) and activation energies (?15 kcal mol^-1) are not physically plausible. We conclude that there are large systematic errors in the study by Rodriguez et al. (Atmos Chem 59:187–197, 2008).