Abstract
A majority of the existing atmospheric rivers (ARs) detection methods is based on magnitude thresholding on either the integrated water vapor (IWV) or integrated vapor transport (IVT). One disadvantage of such an approach is that the predetermined threshold does not have the flexibility to adjust to the fast changing conditions where ARs are embedded. To address this issue, a new AR detection method is derived from an image-processing algorithm that makes the detection independent of AR magnitude. In this study, we compare the North Pacific and Atlantic ARs tracked by the new detection method and two widely used magnitude thresholding methods in the present day climate. The results show considerable sensitivities of the detected AR number, shape, intensities and their accounted IVT accumulations to different methods. In many aspects, ARs detected by the new method lie between those from the two magnitude thresholding methods, but stand out with a greater number of AR tracks, longer track durations, and stronger AR-related moisture transport in the AR tracks. North Pacific and North Atlantic ARs identified by the new method account for around 100–120 × 10 3 kg/m/s IVT within the AR track regions, about 50 % more than the other two methods. This is primarily due to the fact that the new method captures the strong IVT signals more effectively.
Highlights
An atmospheric river (AR) is often characterized as a narrow and elongated filament of enhanced water vapor content in the lower troposphere, within the warm conveyor belt of extratropical cyclones (e.g., [1,2,3,4])
To address the above problems, we recently developed a new AR detection method based on an image-processing technique—the top-hat by reconstruction (THR) algorithm [14]
More technical details of the new method are described in a separate submitted paper, in this work we focus on comparing some characteristics of the ARs tracked by the new THR method and two conventional magnitude thresholding methods: IVT250ano and IVT85%
Summary
Department of Oceanography and Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA Current address: Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China. These authors contributed equally to this work.
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