0000000000027929
AUTHOR
Andrew Lorrey
“Beyond Weather Regimes”: Descriptors Monitoring Atmospheric Centers of Action. A case study for Aotearoa New Zealand
AbstractThis paper introduces a set of descriptors applied to weather regimes, that allow for a detailed monitoring of the location and intensity of their atmospheric centers of action (e.g. troughs and ridges) and the gradients between them, when applicable. Descriptors are designed to document the effect of climate variability and change in modulating the character of daily weather regimes, rather than merely their occurrence statistics.As a case study, the methodology is applied to Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), using ERA5 ensemble reanalysis data for the period 1979-2019. Here, we analyze teleconnections between the regimes and their descriptors, and large-scale climate variability. Result…
Extratropical Impacts of the Madden–Julian Oscillation over New Zealand from a Weather Regime Perspective
Abstract The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) signal in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) extratropics during the austral summer (November–March) is investigated over the New Zealand (NZ) sector, using the paradigm of atmospheric weather regimes (WRs), following a classification initially established by Kidson. The MJO is first demonstrated to have significant impacts on daily rainfall anomalies in NZ. It is suggested that orographic effects arising from the interaction between regional atmospheric circulation anomalies and NZ’s topography can explain the spatially heterogeneous precipitation anomalies that are related to MJO activity. These local impacts and circulation anomalies are shown to be…
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructi…
The SISAL database: a global resource to document oxygen and carbon isotope records from speleothems
Stable isotope records from speleothems provide information on past climate changes, most particularly information that can be used to reconstruct past changes in precipitation and atmospheric circulation. These records are increasingly being used to provide “out-of-sample” evaluations of isotope-enabled climate models. SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) is an international working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. The working group aims to provide a comprehensive compilation of speleothem isotope records for climate reconstruction and model evaluation. The SISAL database contains data for individual speleothems, grouped by cave system. Stable isotopes of oxyg…