Atmospheric rivers associated with summer heavy rainfall over the Yangtze Plain

Abstract

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are long, narrow bands of enhanced water vapour transport in the low atmosphere, mainly from the tropics into the midlatitudes. However, it is still unclear how ARs act on different timescales during the boreal summer when frequent heavy precipitation events take place in East Asia, often resulting in severe flood that impacts property and human lives. In this study, we investigated climatological ARs, and their evolution on both synoptic and subseasonal timescales, associated with heavy rainfall events over the Yangtze Plain in China. Furthermore, their predictability was assessed by examining hindcast skills from an operational coupled seasonal forecast system of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology named ACCESS-S1. Results showed that ARs embedded within the South Asian monsoon and Somali cross-equatorial flow provide a favourable background for steady moisture supply of summer rainfall into East Asia. We call this favourable background a ‘climatological East Asian AR’, which has close connections with seasonal cycles and climatological intraseasonal oscillation of rainfall in the Yangtze Plain during its Meiyu season. The East Asian AR was also influenced by anomalous anticyclonic circulations over the tropical West Pacific when heavy rainfall events occurred over the Yangtze Plain. Different from orography-induced precipitation, ARs that led to heavy rainfall over the Yangtze Plain were linked with the intrusions of cold air from the north. The major source of ARs responsible for heavy precipitation events over the Yangtze Plain appeared to originate from the tropical West Pacific on both synoptic and subseasonal timescales. In 23-year hindcasts for May-June-July the current model, ACCESS-S1, had skillful rainfall forecasts at a lead time of 0 month, but the skill degraded significantly with longer lead times. Nevertheless, the model showed skills in predicting the variations of low-level moisture transport affecting the Yangtze River at longer lead time, suggesting that the ARs influencing summer monsoon rainfall in the East Asian region are likely to be more predictable than rainfall itself. There is potential in using AR predictions from the coupled forecast system to guide rainfall forecasts in the East Asian summer season at longer lead time, which can contribute to disaster prevention and reduction in East Asia.