Extreme events are an important part of climate variability and their intensity and persistence are often modulated by large scale climatic patterns which might act as forcing drivers affecting their probability of occurrence. When the North Tropical Atlantic (NTA) and the Equatorial Pacific (Niño 3 region) anomalies are of opposite signs and the first one is positive while the second one is ne...

Pakistan’s economy is significantly reliant on agriculture. However, Pakistan is included in the most water-stressed countries in the world, and its water resources are considerably vulnerable to climate variability and climate change. Therefore, in the present study, the water resources of the Jhelum River basin, which provides water to 6 million hectares of land of Pakistan and hydropower pro...

Temperature, precipitation and wind extremes over Europe are examined in an ensemble of RCA3 regional climate model simulations driven by six different global climate models (ECHAM5, CCSM3, HadCM3, CNRM, BCM and IPSL) under the SRES A1B emission scenario. The extremes are expressed in terms of the 20-yr return values of annual temperature and wind extremes and seasonal precipitation extremes. T...

The contribution to sea level to 2200 from the grounded, mainland Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet (APIS) was calculated using an ice-sheet model initialized with a new technique computing ice fluxes based on observed surface velocities, altimetry and surface mass balance, and computing volume response using a linearized method. Volume change estimates of the APIS resulting from surface massbalanc...

5 Decadal climate predictions exhibit large biases, which are often subtracted and forgotten. 6 However, understanding the causes of bias is essential to guide efforts to improve prediction 7 systems, and may offer additional benefits. Here we investigate the origins of biases in decadal 8 predictions, and whether analysis of these biases might provide useful information. We focus 9 especially ...

The distribution of the daily wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index in the 40-yr ECMWF ReAnalysis (ERA-40) is significantly negatively skewed. Dynamical and statistical analyses both suggest that this skewness reflects the presence of two distinct regimes—referred to as ‘‘Greenland blocking’’ and ‘‘subpolar jet.’’ Changes in both the relative occurrence and in the structure of the r...

The control run of the Hadley Centre-coupled climate model (HadCM3) is used to establish the sources of multidecadal/ centennial sea level (SL) variations in the northwest Atlantic. It is shown that variations in the sea level for the largest part of this area are related to variations in the thermohaline structure of the upper (c 500 m) part of the ocean. Temperature variations dominate steric...

Satellite measurements of the radiation budget and data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis are used to investigate the links between anomalous cloud radiative forcing over the tropical west Pacific warm pool and the tropical dynamics and sea surface temperature (SST) distribution during 1998. The ratio, N, of the short...

Understanding links between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and snow would be useful for seasonal forecasting, as well as for understanding natural variability and interpreting climate change predictions. Here, a 545-yr run of the third climate configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (HadCM3), with prescribed external forcings and fixed greenhouse gas concentrations, is used to ex...