Applied Climate Studies Centered on the Intra-Americas Sea (Invited)
Abstract
The Intra-Americas Studies of Climate Processes (IASCLIP) is a new program under the umbrella of the Variability of American Monsoon Systems (VAMOS), a division of International CLIVAR. The centerpiece for IASCLIP is the Western Hemisphere warm pool (WHWP) that embraces the eastern North Pacific, the Intra-Americas Sea (IAS — Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico) and the western tropical Atlantic. The WHWP holds promise for summer climate predictability for the Western Hemisphere from northern South America to the Midwest of the United States, with an emphasis on extreme events like hurricanes, floods, droughts and tornados. This predictability derives from two factors: (1) year-to-year variations in the size of the summer WHWP that vary by up to a factor of three in response to boreal spring forcing by potentially predictable winter climate patterns such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Amazon convection; and (2) a summer tropospheric response to WHWP anomalies that affects the tropical cyclone environment and the low-level moisture transports into surrounding land regions. In this talk I will show examples from recent research of these phenomena and outline the IASCLIP strategy to translate summer predictability into useful climate forecast applications.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFM.H41K..08E
- Keywords:
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- 1616 GLOBAL CHANGE / Climate variability;
- 1833 HYDROLOGY / Hydroclimatology;
- 3339 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES / Ocean/atmosphere interactions