Climate Extremes - Patterns And Mechanisms

Climate extreme events occur in patterns. The proposed book will collect recent advancement in the identification of these patterns and mechanisms. A comprehensive documentation of the processes and mechanisms unique to individual weather/climate extremes events will advance the understanding and prediction of future extreme events. Currently, most of the developing theories about the changing patterns of weather/climate extremes are scattered in the literature and, therefore, require a dedicated book to summarize for the research community and graduate students.

Midlatitude and subtropical climate extremes (heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, etc.) have increased and the dynamical processed leading to the increase have been linked to common theories such as arctic amplification, jet stream meandering, tropical expansion, etc. However, the dynamical processes of individual extreme events are manifold and cannot be generalized. The goal of this book is to document the various climate extreme events and associated changes that have been analyzed through diagnostics, modeling, and statistical approaches.

Book chapters will emphasize on, but are not limited to: (a) the growing influence of Rossby wave sources emanating from asymmetric increases in sea surface temperature (SST) and latent heat releases in the western Pacific on stationary waves in the higher latitudes; (b) the meridional gradient of the zonal flow acting as a guide for the propagation of Rossby wave energy, referred to as the circumglobal teleconnection (CGT); (c) the changes in the lifecycle and development processes of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and its precursors; and (d) the role of increased anthropogenic aerosol loading in the changing monsoonal extremes especially in Asia, West Africa and North Atlantic.

Moreover, the role of western Pacific SST and latent heating anomalies in exciting large-amplitude jet stream patterns is manifested in recent extreme events such as the record drought in California and the “polar vortex” that brought frigid weather to eastern US. The post-1980 change in the ENSO precursor pattern (i.e. air-sea conditions that facilitate the development of an ENSO event) has increasingly impacted certain regional climates during the winter. In the warm season, the CGT’s short-wave feature coincides with the scale of jet-stream anomalies associated with extreme droughts/floods at specific regions. For the changing tropical climate extremes, the increased loading of aerosol has been reported to alternate aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions and possibly have resulted in the observed regime shifts such as the mid-1970s and late 1990s (i.e. warming pause).

S.-Y. Simon Wang, Utah State University, USA

Jin-Ho Yoon, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea

Christopher C. Funk, United States Geological Survey, USA

Robert R. Gillies, Utah State University, USA