Abstract
Atmospheric rivers are important atmospheric features implicated in the global water vapor budget, the cloud distribution, and the associated precipitation. The ARiD (Atmospheric River Detector) code has been developed to automatically detect atmospheric rivers from water vapor flux and has been applied to the ECMWF ERA5 archive over the period 1980–2020 above the Atlantic Ocean and Europe. A case study of an atmospheric river formed in the East Atlantic on August 2014 that reached France has been detailed using ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, ground based observation data, and satellite products such as DARDAR, AIRS, GPCP, and GOES. This atmospheric river event presents a strong interaction with an intense upper tropospheric jet stream, which induced stratosphere–troposphere exchanges by tropopause fold. A 1980–2020 climatology of atmospheric rivers over Europe has been presented. The west of France, Iberian Peninsula, and British Islands are the most impacted regions by atmospheric rivers with an occurrence of up to four days per month during the October–April period. Up to 40% of the precipitation observed on the west European coast can be linked to the presence of ARs. No significant trend in the occurrence of the phenomena was found over 1980–2020.
Highlights
Most of the water vapor is concentrated in tropical regions, providing a cloudy region known as the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ)
First studied over the U.S west coast, we proposed documenting the climatology established over the period 1980–2020 with
ARiD, which uses a threshold based on the 85th percentile of the IVT distribution over the North Atlantic basin
Summary
Water vapor is one of the most important natural greenhouse gases and is a key component in the formation of clouds, which constitutes an important source of uncertainty in climate response [1]. The concentration of this gas is highly variable both horizontally and vertically. The vertical distribution is highly heterogeneous, with the majority of water vapor found in the low troposphere. The concentration of water vapor decreases with altitude [3] and anomalously dry layers in the troposphere can be interpreted as small-scale features of stratospheric intrusions [4]. It is important to understand every atmospheric process affecting the water cycle, to study long-term water vapor distributions, cloud structures, and associated precipitation
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