Identification of the distinctive circulation patterns of storminess on the Atlantic margin of Europe forms the main objective of this study; dealing with storm frequency, intensity and tracking. The climatology of the extratropical cyclones that affect this region has been examined for the period 1940–1998. Coastal meteorological data from Ireland to Spain have been linked to the cyclone history for the North Atlantic in the analysis of storm records for European coasts. The study examines the evolution in the occurrence of storms since the 1940s and also their relationship with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Results indicate a seasonal shift in the wind climate, with regionally more severe winters and calmer summers established. This pattern appears to be linked to a northward displacement in the main North Atlantic cyclone track.
An experiment with the ECHAM4 A-GCM at high resolution (T106) has also been used to model the effect of a greenhouse gases induced warming climate on the climatology of coastal storms in the region. The experiment consists of (1), a 30-year control time-slice representing present-day equivalent CO2 concentrations and (2), a 30-year perturbed period corresponding to a time when the radiative forcing has doubled in terms of equivalent CO2 concentrations. The boundary conditions have been obtained from an atmosphere-ocean coupled OA-GCM simulation at low horizontal resolution. An algorithm was developed to allow the identification of individual cyclone movements in selected coastal zones. For most of the northern part of the study region, covering Ireland and Scotland, results describe the establishment by ca. 2060 of a tendency for fewer but more intense storms.
The impacts of these changes in storminess for the vulnerability of European Atlantic coasts are considered. For low-lying, exposed and ‘soft’ sedimentary coasts, as in Ireland, these changes in storminess are likely to result in significant localised increases in coastal erosion. 相似文献
This study delineates the formation of a warm pool (>34°C) of air to the west (downwind) of the active volcano of the Barren Island during October–November 2005. Barren Island is located in the Sumatra–Andaman region, about 135 km east of Port Blair, and lies within the Burma microplate, the southern tip of which experienced a submarine earthquake (Mw 9.3) causing a tsunami in December 2004. Barren Island is the only volcano, which has shown sustained eruptive activity since shortly after the Great Sumatran Earthquake of December 2004. Our observations require further corroboration to relate how submarine earthquakes activate volcanoes and how far these thermal emissions influence climate changes. Because it links global warming and climate changes to the frequent emissions from a volcano activated by submarine earthquakes, this case study is of special interest to the earth-ocean-atmosphere sciences community. 相似文献
The response of the eastern tropical Indian Ocean(ETIO) to heat fluxes of equal amplitude but opposite sign is investigated using the Community Earth System Model(CESM). A significant positive asymmetry in sea surface temperature(SST) is found over the ETIO—the warming responses to the positive forcing exceeds the cooling to the negative forcing. A mixed layer heat budget analysis is carried out to identify the mechanisms responsible for the SST asymmetry. Results show that it is mainly ascribed to the ocean dynamical processes, including vertical advections and diffusion. The net surface heat flux, on the contrary, works to reduce the asymmetry through its shortwave radiation and latent heat flux components. The former is due to the nonlinear relationship between SST and cloud, while the latter is resulted mainly from Newtonian damping and air-sea stability effects. Changes in the SST skewness are also evaluated, with more enhanced negative SST skewness over the ETIO found for the cooling than heating scenarios due to the asymmetric thermocline-SST feedback. 相似文献
Tide gauges distributed all over the world provide valuable information for monitoring mean sea level changes. The statistical models used in estimating sea level change from the tide gauge data assume implicitly that the random model components are stationary in variance. We show that for a large number of global tide gauge data this is not the case for the seasonal part using a variate-differencing algorithm. This finding is important for assessing the reliability of the present estimates of mean sea level changes because nonstationarity of the data may have marked impact on the sea level rate estimates, especially, for the data from short records. 相似文献
Analysis of monthly mean river temperatures, recorded on an hourly basis in the middle reaches of the Loire since 1976, allows reconstruction by multiple linear regression of the annual, spring and summer water temperatures from equivalent information on air temperatures and river discharge. Since 1881, the average annual and summer temperatures of the Loire have risen by approximately 0.8?°C, this increase accelerating since the late 1980s due to the rise in air temperature and also to lower discharge rates. In addition, the thermal regime in the Orleans to Blois reach is considerably affected by the inflow of groundwater from the Calcaires de Beauce aquifer, as shown by the summer energy balance. To cite this article: F. Moatar, J. Gailhard, C. R. Geoscience 338 (2006).相似文献
Ecological systems in the headwaters of the Yellow River, characterized by hash natural environmental conditions, are very vulnerable to climatic change. In the most recent decades, this area greatly attracted the public's attention for its more and more deteriorating environmental conditions. Based on tree-ring samples from the Xiqing Mountain and A'nyêmagên Mountains at the headwaters of the Yellow River in the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau, we reconstructed the minimum temperatures in the winter half year over the last 425 years and the maximum temperatures in the summer half year over the past 700 years in this region. The variation of minimum temperature in the winter half year during the time span of 1578―1940 was a relatively stable trend, which was followed by an abrupt warming trend since 1941. However, there is no significant warming trend for the maximum temperature in the summer half year over the 20th century. The asymmetric variation patterns between the minimum and maximum temperatures were observed in this study over the past 425 years. During the past 425 years, there are similar variation patterns between the minimum and maximum temperatures; however, the minimum temperatures vary about 25 years earlier compared to the maximum temperatures. If such a trend of variation patterns between the minimum and maximum temperatures over the past 425 years continues in the future 30 years, the maximum temperature in this region will increase significantly. 相似文献