Abstract

The influence of Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies on the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic sector during winter is investigated by performing experiments with an atmospheric general circulation model. These consist of a 30-yr run with observed SST anomalies for the period 1961–90 confined geographically to the Atlantic Ocean, and of a control run with climatological SSTs prescribed globally. A third 30-yr integration with observed SSTs confined to the South Atlantic is made to confirm present findings.

The simulated interannual variance of 500-hPa wintertime geopotential heights over the North Atlantic attains much more realistic values when observed Atlantic SSTs are prescribed. Circulation patterns that resemble the positive phase of the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO) become more pronounced in terms of the leading EOF of winter means, and a cluster analysis of daily fields. The variance of an interannual NAO index increases by fivefold over its control value. Atlantic SST variability is also found to produce an appreciable rectified response in the December–February time mean.

Interannual fluctuations in the simulated NAO are found to be significantly correlated with SST anomalies over the tropical and subtropical South Atlantic. These SST anomalies are accompanied by displacements in the simulated summer monsoonal circulation over South America and the cross-equatorial regional Hadley circulation.

Abstract

The equilibrium of an idealized flow driven at the surface by wind stress and rapid relaxation to nonuniform buoyancy is analyzed in terms of entropy production, mechanical energy balance, and heat transport. The flow is rapidly rotating, and dissipation is provided by bottom drag. Diabatic forcing is transmitted from the surface by isotropic diffusion of buoyancy. The domain is periodic so that zonal averaging provides a useful decomposition of the flow into mean and eddy components. The statistical equilibrium is characterized by quantities such as the lateral buoyancy flux and the thermocline depth; here, scaling laws are proposed for these quantities in terms of the external parameters. The scaling theory predicts relations between heat transport, thermocline depth, bottom drag, and diapycnal diffusivity, which are confirmed by numerical simulations. The authors find that the depth of the thermocline is independent of the diapycnal mixing to leading order, but depends on the bottom drag. This dependence arises because the mean stratification is due to a balance between the large-scale wind-driven heat transport and the heat transport due to baroclinic eddies. The eddies equilibrate at an amplitude that depends to leading order on the bottom drag. The net poleward heat transport is a residual between the mean and eddy heat transports. The size of this residual is determined by the details of the diapycnal diffusivity. If the diffusivity is uniform (as in laboratory experiments) then the heat transport is linearly proportional to the diffusivity. If a mixed layer is incorporated by greatly increasing the diffusivity in a thin surface layer then the net heat transport is dominated by the model mixed layer.

Abstract

The radiative flux of internal wave energy (the “tidal conversion”) powered by the oscillating flow of a uniformly stratified fluid over a two-dimensional submarine ridge is computed using an integral-equation method. The problem is characterized by two nondimensional parameters, A and B. The first parameter, A, is the ridge half-width scaled by μh, where h is the uniform depth of the ocean far from the ridge and μ is the inverse slope of internal tidal rays (horizontal run over vertical rise). The second parameter, B, is the ridge height scaled by h. Two topographic profiles are considered: a triangular or tent-shaped ridge and a “polynomial” ridge with continuous topographic slope. For both profiles, complete coverage of the (A, B) parameter space is obtained by reducing the problem to an integral equation, which is then discretized and solved numerically. It is shown that in the supercritical regime (ray slopes steeper than topographic slopes) the radiated power increases monotonically with B and decreases monotonically with A. In the subcritical regime the radiated power has a complicated and nonmonotonic dependence on these parameters. As A → 0 recent results are recovered for the tidal conversion produced by a knife-edge barrier. It is shown analytically that the A → 0 limit is regular: if A ≪ 1 the reduction in tidal conversion below that at A = 0 is proportional to A ². Further, the knife-edge model is shown to be indicative of both conversion rates and the structure of the radiated wave field over a broad region of the supercritical parameter space. As A increases the topographic slopes become gentler, and at a certain value of A the ridge becomes “critical”; that is, there is a single point on the flanks at which the topographic slope is equal to the slope of an internal tidal beam. The conversion decreases continuously as A increases through this transition. Visualization of the disturbed buoyancy field shows prominent singular lines (tidal beams). In the case of a triangular ridge these beams originate at the crest of the triangle. In the case of a supercritical polynomial ridge, the beams originate at the shallowest point on the flank at which the topographic slope equals the ray slope.

Abstract

The equations of motion are reexamined with the objective of improving upon the Boussinesq approximation. The authors derive new equations that conserve energy, filter out sound waves, are more accurate than the Boussinesq set, and are computationally competitive with them. The new equations are partly enabled by exploiting a reversible exchange between internal and gravitational potential fluid energy. To improve upon these equations appears to require the inclusion of acoustics, at which point one should use full Navier–Stokes. This study recommends the new sets for testing in general circulation modeling.

Abstract

The largest mass participation fun run in the world took place in Auckland, New Zealand where an estimated 80000 participants ran 10.4 km “Round the Bays” in the early fall of 1982. Even in the relatively mild climate of Auckland, heat stroke and other types of heat illness occur during this annual event. Techniques for thermal assessment of human bioclimate have not been applied to an exercising crowd although it is widely accepted that crowding will reduce the heat loss of individuals. To quantify the possible heat load brought about by running in a large crowd, those components of the microenvironment that affect radiant, evaporative and convective heat exchange were measured, both within the mass of runners and separately from it. These data were used as input for two detailed body-environment heat exchange models which show the effect of the runners themselves on the thermal environment. Since it is assumed that changes longwave radiation exchange and convective losses from the body are likely to be the major causes of differences between solo and group running, these avenues of heat exchange are carefully assessed . The results show that longwave radiative losses can be reduced substantially by running in a lame group compared to solo running, but the absolute size of the increase in net heat load on the individual is small. However, heat loss by convection for group runners is less than half that for sole runners. This may be the result of entertainment of air within an atmospheric envelope below head level in which wind speed and direction are the same as the runner's and direction. For the weather conditions prevailing at the time of the experiment, jogging in the main bunch of runners is estimated to cause, on occasions, more than three times the heat stress on the body compared to that experienced when running solo along the same route at the same time of day during identical weather conditions.

Abstract

Lagos, Nigeria, is rapidly urbanizing and is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with a population that is increasing at almost 500 000 people per year. Yet the impacts on Lagos’s local climate via its urban heat island (UHI) have not been well explored. Considering that the tropics already have year-round high temperatures and humidity, small changes are very likely to tip these regions over heat-health thresholds. Using a well-established model, but with an extended investigation of uncertainty, we explore the impact of Lagos’s recent urbanization on its UHI. Following a multiphysics evaluation, our simulations, against the background of an unusually warm period in February 2016 (during which temperatures regularly exceeded 36°C), show a 0.44°C ensemble-time-mean increase in nighttime UHI intensity between 1984 and 2016. The true scale of the impact is seen spatially as the area over which ensemble-time-mean UHIs exceed 1°C was found to increase steeply from 254 km² in 1984 to 1572 km² in 2016. The rate of warming within Lagos will undoubtedly have a high impact because of the size of the population (12+ million) already at risk from excess heat. Significant warming and modifications to atmospheric boundary layer heights are also found in rural areas downwind, directly caused by the city. However, there is limited long-term climate monitoring in Lagos or many similarly expanding cities, particularly in the tropics. As such, our modeling can only be an indication of this impact of urbanization, and we highlight the urgent need to deploy instrumentation.

Abstract

The observation-based source terms available in the third-generation wave model WAVEWATCH III (i.e., the ST6 package for parameterizations of wind input, wave breaking, and swell dissipation terms) are recalibrated and verified against a series of academic and realistic simulations, including the fetch/duration-limited test, a Lake Michigan hindcast, and a 1-yr global hindcast. The updated ST6 not only performs well in predicting commonly used bulk wave parameters (e.g., significant wave height and wave period) but also yields a clearly improved estimation of high-frequency energy level (in terms of saturation spectrum and mean square slope). In the duration-limited test, we investigate the modeled wave spectrum in a detailed way by introducing spectral metrics for the tail and the peak of the omnidirectional wave spectrum and for the directionality of the two-dimensional frequency–direction spectrum. The omnidirectional frequency spectrum E(f) from the recalibrated ST6 shows a clear transition behavior from a power law of approximately f ⁻⁴ to a power law of about f ⁻⁵, comparable to previous field studies. Different solvers for nonlinear wave interactions are applied with ST6, including the Discrete Interaction Approximation (DIA), the more expensive Generalized Multiple DIA (GMD), and the very expensive exact solutions [using the Webb–Resio–Tracy method (WRT)]. The GMD-simulated E(f) is in excellent agreement with that from WRT. Nonetheless, we find the peak of E(f) modeled by the GMD and WRT appears too narrow. It is also shown that in the 1-yr global hindcast, the DIA-based model overestimates the low-frequency wave energy (wave period T > 16 s) by 90%. Such model errors are reduced significantly by the GMD to ~20%.

Abstract

A field experiment to study the spectral balance of the source terms for wind-generated waves in finite water depth was carried out in Lake George, Australia. The measurements were made from a shore-connected platform at varying water depths from 1.2 m down to 20 cm. Wind conditions and the geometry of the lake were such that fetch-limited conditions with fetches ranging from approximately 10 km down to 1 km prevailed. The resulting waves were intermediate-depth wind waves with inverse wave ages in the range 1 < U ₁₀/C_p < 8. The atmospheric input, bottom friction, and whitecap dissipation were measured directly and synchronously by an integrated measurement system, described in the paper. In addition, simultaneous data defining the directional wave spectrum, atmospheric boundary layer profile, and atmospheric turbulence were available. The contribution to the spectral evolution due to nonlinear interactions of various orders is investigated by a combination of bispectral analysis of the data and numerical modeling. The relatively small scale of the lake enabled experimental conditions such as the wind field and bathymetry to be well defined. The observations were conducted over a 3-yr period, from September 1997 to August 2000, with a designated intensive measurement period [the Australian Shallow Water Experiment (AUSWEX)] carried out in August–September 1999. High data return was achieved.

During the summer of 1989, the Forecast Systems Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sponsored an evaluation of artificial-intelligence-based systems that forecast severe convective storms. The evaluation experiment, called Shootout-89, took place in Boulder, Colorado, and focused on storms over the northeastern Colorado foothills and plains.

Six systems participated in Shootout-89: three traditional expert systems, a hybrid system including a linear model augmented by a small expert system, an analogue-based system, and a system developed using methods from the cognitive science/judgment analysis tradition.

Each day of the exercise, the systems generated 2–9-h forecasts of the probabilities of occurrence of nonsignificant weather, significant weather, and severe weather in each of four regions in northeastern Colorado. A verification coordinator working at the Denver Weather Service Forecast Office gathered ground-truth data from a network of observers.

The systems were evaluated on several measures of forecast skill, on timeliness, on ease of learning, and on ease of use. They were generally easy to operate; however, they required substantially different levels of meteorological expertise on the part of their users, reflecting the various operational environments for which they had been designed. The systems varied in their statistical behavior, but on this difficult forecast problem, they generally showed a skill approximately equal to that of persistence forecasts and climatological forecasts.

Abstract

Surface meteorological analyses are an essential input (termed “forcing”) for hydrologic modeling. This study investigated the sensitivity of different hydrologic model configurations to temporal variations of seven forcing variables (precipitation rate, air temperature, longwave radiation, specific humidity, shortwave radiation, wind speed, and air pressure). Specifically, the effects of temporally aggregating hourly forcings to hourly daily average forcings were examined. The analysis was based on 14 hydrological outputs from the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA) model for the 671 Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-Sample Studies (CAMELS) basins across the contiguous United States (CONUS). Results demonstrated that the hydrologic model sensitivity to temporally aggregating the forcing inputs varies across model output variables and model locations. We used Latin hypercube sampling to sample model parameters from eight combinations of three influential model physics choices (three model decisions with two options for each decision, i.e., eight model configurations). Results showed that the choice of model physics can change the relative influence of forcing on model outputs and the forcing importance may not be dependent on the parameter space. This allows for model output sensitivity to forcing aggregation to be tested prior to parameter calibration. More generally, this work provides a comprehensive analysis of the dependence of modeled outcomes on input forcing behavior, providing insight into the regional variability of forcing variable dominance on modeled outputs across CONUS.