Interactions between soil moisture and the atmosphere are driven by the partitioning of sensible and latent heating, through which soil moisture has been connected to atmospheric modifications that could potentially lead to the initiation of convective precipitation. The majority of previous studies linking the land surface to subsequent precipitation have used atmospheric reanalysis or model d...

Light use efficiency (LUE) is a key biophysical parameter characterizing the ability of plants to convert absorbed light to carbohydrate. However, the environmental regulations on LUE, especially moisture stress, are poorly understood, leading to large uncertainties in primary productivity estimated by LUE models. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of moisture stress on L...

The absence of the Drake Passage (DP) gateway in coupled models generally leads to vigorous Antarctic bottom water (AABW) formation, Antarctic warming, and the absence of North Atlantic deep-water (NADW) formation. Here the authors show that this result depends critically on atmospheric moisture transport by midlatitude storms. The authors use coupled model simulations employing geometries diff...

The Mediterranean climate region on the west coast of the United States is characterized by wet winters and dry summers, and by high fire activity. The importance of synoptic-scale circulation patterns (ENSO, PDO, PNA) on fire-climate interactions is evident in contemporary fire data sets and in pre-Euroamerican tree-ring-based fire records. We investigated how interannual variability in two fi...

Water vapour, one of the dominant greenhouse gases, is a highly variable constituent of the Earth's atmosphere with a high latent heat. These two factors give it a key role in the development of atmospheric dynamics. Knowledge of the behaviour and distribution of water vapour in the atmosphere is crucial for understanding and predicting weather and climate. Unfortunately, atmospheric water vapo...

The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) produced by a mesoscale model is investigated using standardized statistical diagnostics. Results show that upperand lowerlevel zonal winds display the correct MJO structure, phase speed (8 m s) and space–time power spectrum. However, the simulated free atmosphere moisture, outgoing longwave radiation and precipitation do not exhibit any clear MJO signal. Yet...