We investigated upwelling variability along the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula for the period 1948−2009 by means of wind data extracted from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis project. According to most previous studies, a remarkable weakening in upwelling intensity has been observed in the area. However, the observed linear trends are highly dependent on the length of the series. Here we show ho...

The study presented here attempts to quantify the significance of southerly water vapor fluxes on precipitation occurring in the eastern Fertile Crescent region. The water vapor fluxes were investigated at high temporal and spatial resolution by using a Regional Climate Model [fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5)–Noah land surface model] to downscale the NCE...

We examined changes in several independent intensity indices of four major tropical monsoonal circulations for the period 1950–1998. These intensity indices included observed land surface precipitation and observed ocean surface pressure in the monsoon regions as well as upperlevel divergence calculated at several standard levels from the NCAR/NCEP reanalysis. These values were averaged seasona...

The climatological annual mean tropical-extratropical pathways of thermocline waters in the Atlantic Ocean are investigated with the NCAR CCSM numerical coupled model. Results from three numerical experiments are analyzed: Two are fully coupled runs with different spatial resolution (T42 and T85) for the atmospheric component. The third numerical experiment is an ocean-only run forced by NCEP w...

Empirical knowledge of how cirrus cloud properties are coupled with the large-scale meteorological environment is a prerequisite for understanding the role of microphysical processes in the life cycle of cirrus cloud systems. Using active and passive remote sensing data from the A-Train, relationships between cirrus cloud properties and the large-scale dynamics are examined. Mesoscale cirrus ev...

Solar radiation incident at the Earth’s surface (Rs) is an essential component of the total energy exchange between the atmosphere and the surface. Reanalysis data have been widely used, but a comprehensive validation using surface measurements is still highly needed. In this study, we evaluated the Rs estimates from six current representative global reanalyses (NCEP–NCAR, NCEP-DOE; CFSR; ERA-I...

We present a comparison of the zonal mean meridional circulations derived from monthly in situ data (i.e. radiosondes and ship reports) and from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis product. To facilitate the interpretation of the results, a third estimate of the mean meridional circulation is produced by subsampling the reanalysis at the locations where radiosonde and surface ship data are available for t...

Dynamical downscaling has been extensively used to study regional climate forced by large-scale global climate models. During the downscaling process, however, the simulation of regional climate models (RCMs) tends to drift away from the driving fields. Developing a solution that addresses this issue, by retaining the large scale features (from the large-scale fields) and the small-scale featur...