Climatological Relationship between Warm Season Atmospheric Rivers and Heavy Rainfall over East Asia

Journal of the Meteorological Society of Japan

Shang-Ping XIE¹  Youichi KAMAE²  Wei MEI³ 

[1] Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA;Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan;Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, California, USA

关键词: ENSO;    atmospheric river;    Indo-western Pacific Ocean Capacitor;    heavy rainfall;   

DOI  :  10.2151/jmsj.2017-027

学科分类：大气科学

来源: Meteorological Society of Japan

【 摘 要 】

 Eddy transport of atmospheric water vapor from the tropics is important for rainfall and related natural disasters in the middle latitudes. Atmospheric rivers (ARs), intense moisture plumes that are typically associated with extratropical cyclones, often produce heavy precipitation upon encountering topography on the west coasts of mid-latitude North America and Europe. ARs also occur over the northwestern Pacific and sometimes cause floods and landslides over East Asia, but the climatological relationship between ARs and heavy rainfall in this region remains unclear. Here we evaluate the contribution of ARs to the hydrological cycle over East Asia using high-resolution daily rainfall observations and an atmospheric reanalysis during 1958-2007. Despite their low occurrence, ARs account for 14-44 % of the total rainfall and 20-90 % of extreme heavy-rainfall events during spring, summer, and autumn. AR-related extreme rainfall is especially pronounced over western-to-southeastern slopes of terrains over the Korean Peninsula and Japan, owing to strong orographic effects and a stable direction of low-level moisture flows. A strong relationship between warm-season AR heavy rainfall and preceding-winter El Niño is identified since the 1970s, suggesting the potential of predicting heavy-rainfall risk over Korea and Japan at seasonal leads.

【 授权许可】

Unknown