When Will Humanity Notice Its Influence on Atmospheric Rivers?

Abstract

AbstractQuantifying the response of atmospheric rivers (ARs) to radiative forcing is challenging due to uncertainties caused by internal climate variability, differences in shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), and methods used in AR detection algorithms. In addition, the requirement of medium‐to‐high model resolution and ensemble sizes to explicitly simulate ARs and their statistics can be computationally expensive. In this study, we leverage the unique 50‐km large ensembles generated by a Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory next‐generation global climate model, Seamless system for Prediction and EArth system Research, to explore the warming response in ARs. Under both moderate and high emissions scenarios, increases in AR‐day frequency emerge from the noise of internal variability by 2060. This signal is robust across different SSPs and time‐independent detection criteria. We further examine an alternative approach proposed by Thompson et al. (2015), showing that unforced AR variability can be approximated by a first‐order autoregressive process. The confidence intervals of the projected response can be analytically derived with a single ensemble member.