Transcript Task 5.1.1

CIRCE project RL5 WP1 Task 1 TAU group
Analysis of changes in Atmospheric
water budget
Prof. Pinhas Alpert
Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, Faculty of Exact Sciences,
Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Objectives
Producing an integrated assessment of the expected
variations of the water cycle in the Mediterranean
region due to global climate changes
Overall RL5 objectives :
Assessment of the past variations and future projections of the water cycle in
the Mediterranean environment due to global climate change. It is focused on
the main components of atmospheric and inland and oceanic water cycle that
are expected to be highly impacted by climate evolution
Focus
• Analysis of changes in the Atmospheric Moisture
Budget in regional climate modelling (RCM) for the
recent climate and for different future scenarios
including the surface evaporation, precipitation and
total moisture in the atmosphere
• Assess the construction of moisture spatial distribution,
features of water vapour budget components for
different amount of regional precipitation, and the
moisture source contributed to the regional precipitation
• Comparison study with data from other sources
Data and Methods
The data currently (at kick-off time) available
databases in TAU are:
• Hadley Centre,
• NASA FVGCM,
• regional downscaling climate models :
PRECIS1, PRECIS 2 at 50 km (A2 & B2)
• ICTP-20km, ICTP-50km
• Data processing and statistical analysis
Example 1: Related climate change
• Science Paper 5 April 2007 Seager et. Al & N.
Harnik:
Title: Model Projections of an Imminent
Transition to a More Arid Climate in
Southwestern North America
P-E, P & E anomalies over American southwest
Fig.1:
Modeled changes in annual mean precipitation minus
evaporation over the American Southwest (125º W---95º W,
25ºN---40ºN, land areas only) averaged over ensemble members
for each of the 19 models. Anomalies for each model are relative to
that model’s climatologies for 1950----2000. SResA1B emissions
P-E spread for 19 models
Fig.2: The change in annual mean P-E for 19 models relative to model
climatologies for 1950-2000. Results are averaged over twenty year
segments of the current century. Units are in mm/day.
P-E for four coupled models 1870-2100
Fig.3: Likes Fig.2. but only from four coupled models. Results are from
individual simulations of the 1860 to 2000 period forced by known and
estimated climate forcings and individual projections of future climate
using the SResA1B scenarios of climate forcings.
Fig.4:The change in annual means of P-E for 2021-2040 minus 1995-2000 (all panels, contours)
and contributions to the change in vertically integrated moisture convergence (colors) by
the mean flow due to changes in the Flow (top), the specific humidity (middle) and the
transient eddy moisture convergence (bottom), all for the GFDL CM2.1 model.
Example 2: moisture budget
neglected term
Y. Shay-El#, P. Alpert , and A. daSilva,
"Preliminary estimation of horizontal fluxes of
cloud liquid water in relation to subtropical
moisture budget studies employing ISCCP,
SSMI and GEOS-1/DAS datasets", J. Geophys.
Res., 105, No. D14, 18,067, 2000.
#Part
of Y. Shay-El Ph.D. Thesis
Also:
Alpert and Y. Shay-El, "The paradox of the net moisture sink over the
Arabian-Iraqi desert during winter", Annales Geophysicae, 11, No. 2-3,
190-194, 1993.
Another suggested solution to Peixoto & Oort paradox (1960)
Consider cloud liquid water (CLW) fluxes,
and neglect the water storage term, the
vertically integrated moisture equation
takes the form:
  Q    CLW  E  P
Q
=moisture flux divergence term
  CLW =CLW flux divergence term
The contents of vertically integrated CLW can
be estimated by the muti-regression equation:
w  0.127  Clow  0.162  C mid  0.179  C high
w
is the contents of vertically integrated CLW
Clow , C mid and C high
are the low, middle and high
level cloud amount
Contents of cloud liquid water for
1992, unit is mg/cm-2
First ever map of CLW for a full year
Cloud liquid water flux divergence,
Jan, Feb, Dec 1992