Search results for "Moisture advection"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
The effects of the Southwest Indian Ocean tropical cyclones on Ethiopian drought
1998
Tropical cyclones are one of the prominent weather systems that are generated over the tropical oceans. The cyclones that develop in the Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO) usually travel west then southwest and finally recurve to southeast, generally before reaching the East African coast. However, it is shown in this study how SWIO-tropical cyclones/depressions can indirectly affect Ethiopian weather. Using correlation and composite analyses, interannual and intraseasonal rainfall variations in Ethiopia were compared with the frequency and time of occurrence of the tropical cyclones. Years showing the consecutive occurrence of several tropical depressions over the SWIO coincide with the drought…
Sources of water vapour contributing to the Elbe flood in August 2002-A tagging study in a mesoscale model
2009
In this study we investigate the contribution of various moisture sources to the Elbe flood that occurred in Central Europe during August 2002. An 8-day simulation with the mesoscale numerical weather prediction model CHRM, including newly implemented water vapour tracers, has been performed. According to the simulation, rather than drawing moisture from one single dominant source region, water vapour from widely separated moisture sources contributed to the extreme precipitation in the most affected area, notably at distinct, subsequent periods of time, and each in significant amounts. These moisture sources include the Atlantic and Mediterranean ocean areas inside the model domain, evapot…
Summer Sahel-ENSO teleconnection and decadal time scale SST variations
2001
The correlation between Sahel rainfall and El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the northern summer has been varying for the last fifty years. We propose that the existence of periods of weak or strong relationship could result from an interaction with the global decadal scale sea surface temperature (SST) background. The main modes of SST variability have been extracted through a principal component analysis with Varimax rotation. The correlations between a July-September Sahel rainfall index and these SST modes have been computed on a 20-year running window between 1945 and 1993. The correlations with the interannual ENSO-SST mode are negative, not significant in the 1960s during the tr…
Influence of the Madden-Julian Oscillation on East African rainfall. Part I: Intraseasonal variability and regional dependency
2006
The influence of the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) on rainfall amounts over Equatorial East Africa (Kenya and northern Tanzania) is analysed for the period 1979–95 at the intraseasonal (pentad) time-scale. The two rainy seasons (March to May and October to December) are considered. Intraseasonal wet events in East Africa are embedded in large-scale zonal circulation anomaly patterns along the equator, showing distinct eastward propagation. It is further found that these ‘wet’ events display a clear phasing with respect to the MJO cycle. This phasing is expressed as out-of-phase variations between the Highland and the coastal areas. Such a pattern is suggested to reflect different rain-cau…
West African Monsoon water cycle: 1. A hybrid water budget data set
2010
International audience; This study investigates the West African Monsoon water cycle with the help of a new hybrid water budget data set developed within the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses. Surface water and energy fluxes are estimated from an ensemble of land surface model simulations forced with elaborate precipitation and radiation products derived from satellite observations, while precipitable water tendencies are estimated from numerical weather prediction analyses. Vertically integrated atmospheric moisture flux convergence is estimated as a residual. This approach provides an advanced, comprehensive atmospheric water budget, including evapotranspiration,…
Impacts of soil moisture content on simulated mesoscale circulations during the summer over eastern Spain
2015
Abstract The Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) version 6.0 has been used to investigate the impact and influence of initial soil moisture distributions on mesoscale circulations. To do this, two different events have been selected from the 2011 summer season: one at the beginning of the season (June) and the other one at the end of the season (August). For each of these mesoscale frameworks a total of five distinct simulations were performed varying the initial soil moisture content: a control run and four additional sensitivity tests. The control run, corresponding to a low soil moisture content, is the one used within the real-time weather forecasting system implemented in the V…