Modeling Stratospheric Impacts on North American Extreme Events – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

Extreme stratospheric wave activity during winter can exhibit downward coupling to the troposphere, extending to the surface. In a new study, Ding et al. [2023] quantify the impacts of strong stratospheric wave events on surface temperature and pressure over North America, and their influences on ‘atmospheric rivers’ (AR) that transport extreme amounts of water to the west coast of the United States. This is the first work to identify stratospheric influences on AR.

The authors find that these weather and circulation changes are linked to the vertical coupling of planetary waves between the troposphere and stratosphere. Their research further examines the behavior of stratosphere-troposphere coupling in state-of-the-art climate models from CMIP6. While some models capture realistic coupling behavior, models with a degraded representation of stratospheric wave structures exhibit systematic tropospheric biases during strong wave events. These findings encourage improved representation of the stratosphere in climate models.

Citation: Ding, X., Chen, G., & Ma, W. (2023). Stratosphere-troposphere coupling of extreme stratospheric wave activity in CMIP6 models. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128, e2023JD038811. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JD038811

—William J. Randel, Editor, JGR: Atmospheres

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