Mid-Pliocene North American Monsoon in Weather Resolving Coupled Simulations

Abstract

<p>The North American Southwest (SW NA) has recently experienced periods of extreme drought, largely due to an increased intensity in evaporation. Yet, there remains large uncertainty in the predicted future changes of precipitation over this region. As a result, the future of SW NA hydroclimate remains uncertain.  The North American Monsoon (NAM) is an atmospheric circulation feature of SW NA hydroclimate that is generated by interactions between topography and moisture surge from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico.  Previous research has shown a weakened NAM in response to elevated levels of atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub>.  However, when analyzing proxy paleoclimate reconstructions during the Pliocene, various records suggest wetter conditions during that time.  We use the mid-Pliocene (3.3 – 3.0 Millions of years ago) as an analog for ongoing climate change because this interval featured topography, geography, and biome assemblages similar to today, but a warmer global mean temperature by 2 - 4 °C compared to pre-industrial, and a sustained 400 ppm CO<sub>2</sub>.  Here we are testing whether a high resolution simulation (25 km) can better capture the NAM and provide different sensitivity to boundary conditions compared to low resolution (100 km) simulations, using the same Community Earth System Model.  Increased resolution has been shown to improve the representation of features within the NAM for simulations of the present.   Our pre-industrial simulations display a more extensive monsoon region with high spatial resolution, which indicates a dependency of simulated NAM on resolving topographic features such as the Rockies, Basin and Range, and Gulf of California, all of which can only be captured at high spatial resolutions.  Simulations of the mid-Pliocene displayed weakened NAM precipitation along the west coast of the southwestern North America at a low resolution when compared to the pre-industrial run.  Yet, this weakening signal is limited to the Pacific side of the orographic slopes in the high resolution simulation, with the rest of the monsoon region featuring increased precipitation.  Ongoing work will explore the sources for this resolution dependency, and will quantify contributions of mesoscale systems, such as tropical and extratropical cyclones, to precipitation in the monsoon region.</p>