Despite being the second-smallest ocean on Earth, the Southern Ocean plays an outsized role in absorbing heat and carbon generated from human activities, accounting for over 40% of the planet’s oceanic carbon uptake and 67%–98% of the global ocean heat uptake. As the climate warms, however, changes to the Southern Ocean’s circulation – caused by stronger, more southerly winds and increased meltwater from the Antarctic ice sheet – could affect its heat and carbon absorption abilities, which in turn would have significant consequences for global temperatures and sea level rise. Read More…
GFDL Research Highlights
The occurrence of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods, has increased substantially since the pre-industrial period, but this trend has large regional variations. An important driver of the regional climate variability is the zonally asymmetric atmospheric circulation, or stationary waves, forced by the zonal asymmetries in the Earth’s surface such as the land-sea thermal contrast and elevated terrain (e.g., hills and mountains). Read More…
The Northwest Atlantic Shelf, from the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia to the Gulf of Maine to Newfoundland, has warmed more rapidly than almost any other part of the ocean in the last two decades. This warming has had severe impacts on marine ecosystems and coastal communities. Understanding the drivers of this warming and predicting whether it will continue is thus important for mitigating or adapting to future impacts. Read More…
August 13th, 2024 - Anthropogenic effects on tropical cyclones near Western Europe
Tropical Cyclones (TC) hitting Western Europe are not as rare as one might think. Approximately 10% of Atlantic TCs have made landfall in Europe in the past four decades, about one European landfall per year. Understanding and projecting TC frequency change is especially challenging in certain coastal regions with lower TC activity yet high exposure, and a relatively short duration of reliable observed records – such as Western Europe. Read More…
Large, damaging wildfires are becoming a common occurrence in Canada, the Pacific Northwest, and California. Five of the most destructive wildfire seasons of the last half-century have occurred in the past seven years. These wildfires can cause significant air pollution: burning biomass emits hundreds of reactive gases, including nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and an array of volatile organic compounds. Read More…
Nitrogen fertilizer usage and cultivation-induced biological nitrogen fixation help feed nearly half the global population. These practices, in addition to fossil fuel burning for energy production, have increased reactive nitrogen losses to the environment, causing a cascade of negative impacts on the ecosystem and human health. Nitrogen emissions to the atmosphere have contributed to acid rain, air pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, and the radiative forcing underlying climate change. Nitrogen fluxes from lands have also impaired freshwater quality and contributed to coastal eutrophication, hypoxia, and harmful algal blooms, putting aquatic resources and the communities that depend upon them at risk. Read More…
Sea level rise (SLR) is one of the most severe consequences of a warming climate, causing dangerous flooding and threatening lives and infrastructure in low-lying coastal regions. This study investigated the potential physical drivers responsible for the observed acceleration of SLR after 2010 along the U.S. Southeast Coast. Using observations and climate models, the authors show that the rapid increase in the rate of SLR along the Southeast Coast after 2010 is due in part to multidecadal buoyancy-driven Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) variations, along with heat transport convergence from wind-driven ocean circulation changes. Read More…
Recent studies indicate that virtually all global climate models have difficulty simulating observed sea surface temperature (SST) trend patterns over the past four decades. Models produce enhanced warming in the eastern Equatorial Pacific (EPAC) and Southern Ocean (SO) warming, while observations show intensified warming in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) and slight cooling in the eastern EPAC and SO. Read More…
This study explored the extent to which the strong year-to-year variations of wind energy resources in the contiguous United States may be predictable using GFDL’s SPEAR seasonal prediction system. The authors demonstrate SPEAR’s capability for predicting the observed strong year-to-year variations of spring wind energy resources with great skill over the Southern Great Plains, in which more than half of the total U.S. wind capacity is located. SPEAR also can provide state-level spring wind energy prediction with a correlation skill reaching 0.8 for Texas, which alone accounts for almost a quarter of the total U.S. wind capacity. These skillful seasonal wind energy predictions at the regional scale or state level can provide valuable information over the Great Plains for coping with year-to-year variations and optimizing wind energy production. Read More…
May 28th, 2024 - Cloud radiative effects associated with daily weather regimes
This research Investigates the effect of high-impact storms on Earth’s radiation budget, in order to better constrain climate models and improve weather and climate forecasts. Using detailed satellite observations and reanalysis data, the author categorized daily weather patterns into different types and measured the cloud radiative effects (CRE) associated with each type. The weather patterns included non-precipitation days, drizzle, wet non-storm days, and storm days, encompassing events like atmospheric rivers, tropical storms, and mesoscale convective systems. Read More…