Atmospheric Rivers, Floods and the Water Resources of California

Winter floods in Britain are connected to atmospheric rivers

[1] Damage from flooding in the winter and fall seasons has been widespread in the United Kingdom (UK) and Western Europe over recent decades. Here we show that winter flood events in the UK are connected to Atmospheric Rivers (ARs), narrow ribbons along which a large flux of moisture is transported from the subtropics to the mid-latitudes. Combining river flow records with rainfall measurement...

Climate Change, Atmospheric Rivers, and Floods in California – a Multimodel Analysis of Storm Frequency and Magnitude Changes

Recent studies have documented the important role that ‘‘atmospheric rivers’’ (ARs) of concentrated near-surface water vapor above the Pacific Ocean play in the storms and floods in California, Oregon, and Washington. By delivering large masses of warm, moist air (sometimes directly from the Tropics), ARs establish conditions for the kinds of high snowlines and copious orographic rainfall that ...

The detection of atmospheric rivers in atmospheric reanalyses and their links to British winter floods and the large-scale climatic circulation

[1] Atmospheric Rivers (ARs), narrow plumes of enhanced moisture transport in the lower troposphere, are a key synoptic feature behind winter flooding in midlatitude regions. This article develops an algorithm which uses the spatial and temporal extent of the vertically integrated horizontal water vapor transport for the detection of persistent ARs (lasting 18 h or longer) in five atmospheric r...

Investigation of the Relation between South and Southwest Iran's Heavy Rainfall with Atmospheric Rivers (ARs).

In this study, we tried to identify the sources of moisture and its direction of heavy rainfall in south and southwest of Iran by using a new algorithm based on atmospheric rivers. For this purpose, daily rainfall of 17 synoptic stations in the period 1986 to 2015 in south and southwestern Iran that have a common time span and fully cover the study area is used.Also from the data set of the Nat...

How Do Atmospheric Rivers Form?