Global Floods and Water Availability Driven by Atmospheric Rivers

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 ...

How Do Atmospheric Rivers Form?

Atmospheric rivers: a mini-review

*Correspondence: Luis Gimeno, EPhyslab, Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Vigo, Campus As Lagoas, 32004 Ourense, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow regions responsible for the majority of the poleward water vapor transport across the midlatitudes. They are characterized by high water vapor content and strong low level winds, and form a part of the ...

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...