Hydroclimatic Events in Regions Subject to Rainfall Oscillation

A special issue of Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (ISSN 2077-1312). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Oceanography".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 January 2022) | Viewed by 5328

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

While some regions are subject to strong seasonality of precipitation, others experience an interannual rainfall oscillation with socioeconomic and environmental impacts that largely depend on the mechanisms involved. If we exclude the oscillation in the 2–7-year band partly imputable to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is well documented, oscillation in the 5–10-year band can also have a strong impact. Usually generated by sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies produced by Rossby waves at mid-latitudes with an average period of 8 years, and possibly amplified by anthropogenic forcing, the decadal oscillation of rainfall can lead to catastrophic events. This may happen under the effect of extratropical cyclones when they are guided by positive SST anomalies, which is what happened when Hurricane Katrina caused landfall off the coast of Louisiana on August 29, 2005. This rainfall oscillation can also lead to episodes of flood, or drought, even heat waves, as happened in Western Europe in 2003. Longer-period rainfall oscillation may be critical to understanding the link between climate change and biodiversit, such as the millennial-scale precipitation variability across tropical–subtropical South America, or the orbital-scale precipitation variability between Western and Eastern Amazonia, which exhibits a quasi-dipole pattern, or even the weakening of the amplitude of ENSO during the Holocene. In this Special Issue, we aim to bring together theoretical, observational, and modelling studies and to review and advance our understanding and prediction of rainfall variability at different timescales with a special emphasis on, but not limited to, ocean–atmosphere interactions. For long periods, we can refer to the different subharmonic modes of the climate system (http://climatorealist.neowordpress.fr/subharmonic-modes/).

Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • decadal rainfall variability
  • multidecadal rainfall variability
  • multicentennial rainfall variability
  • subharmonic modes
  • extreme events

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 4022 KiB  
Article
What Speleothems Tell Us about Long-Term Rainfall Oscillation throughout the Holocene on a Planetary Scale
by Jean-Louis Pinault and Ligia Pereira
J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2021, 9(8), 853; https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse9080853 - 8 Aug 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2434
Abstract
Within the context of anthropogenic warming, rainfall oscillations may induce especially important societal impacts worldwide. In this article, we propose to study potential underlying mechanisms related to precipitation changes on a planetary scale by taking advantage of the recent theory of Rossby waves [...] Read more.
Within the context of anthropogenic warming, rainfall oscillations may induce especially important societal impacts worldwide. In this article, we propose to study potential underlying mechanisms related to precipitation changes on a planetary scale by taking advantage of the recent theory of Rossby waves of long periods winding around subtropical gyres, the Gyral Rossby Waves (GRWs). The stable oxygen isotopic compositions of speleothems are used to regionalize and reconstruct the evolution of long-term rainfall oscillation during the Holocene. The method applied here consists in estimating the wavelet power of dated series of stable oxygen isotopic composition (δ18O) in speleothems within period bands representative of subharmonic modes. Our findings highlight: (1) hydrological processes resulting from friction between the North Equatorial Current (NEC) and the North Equatorial Counter Current (NECC) to explain the weakening of ENSO activity in mid-Holocene, and (2) the quasi-resonance of the equatorward migration of the summer Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) during the Holocene, because of the progressive decrease of the thermal gradient between the low and high latitudes of the gyres. The results of this study suggest that the spatial and temporal variations in the amplitude of the rainfall oscillations are related both on the acceleration/deceleration phases of the western boundary currents and on the shrinkage of the Hadley cell. The latitudinal shift of the summer ITCZ in response to changes in the thermal gradient is of the utmost importance in predicting the expansion of deserts resulting from anthropogenic warming. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hydroclimatic Events in Regions Subject to Rainfall Oscillation)
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12 pages, 3640 KiB  
Article
Glaciers and Paleorecords Tell Us How Atmospheric Circulation Changes and Successive Cooling Periods Occurred in the Fennoscandia during the Holocene
by Jean-Louis Pinault
J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2021, 9(8), 832; https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse9080832 - 31 Jul 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1961
Abstract
Two major climatic phenomena that occurred during the Holocene are interpreted from the resonance in subharmonic modes of long-period Rossby waves winding around the North Atlantic gyre, the so-called gyral Rossby waves (GRWs). These are, on the one hand, the change in atmospheric [...] Read more.
Two major climatic phenomena that occurred during the Holocene are interpreted from the resonance in subharmonic modes of long-period Rossby waves winding around the North Atlantic gyre, the so-called gyral Rossby waves (GRWs). These are, on the one hand, the change in atmospheric circulation that occurred in the North Atlantic in the middle Holocene, and, on the other hand, the occurrence of abrupt cooling events more frequently than what is generally accepted. The amplitude of GRWs is deduced by filtering, within bands characteristic of various subharmonic modes, climate records from the Greenland ice sheet, pollen, and tree rings in northern Fennoscandia, and from two Norwegian glaciers in northern Folgefonna and on the Lyngen peninsula. While the subharmonic modes reflect the acceleration/deceleration phases of the western boundary current, an anharmonic mode is evidenced in the 400–450 year band. Abrupt cooling events of the climate are paced by this anharmonic mode while the western boundary current is decelerating, and the northward heat advection of air favors the melting of the pack ice. Then, the current of the northernmost part of the North Atlantic gyre cools before branching off to the north, which alters its buoyancy. On the other hand, according to high subharmonic modes, high-pressure systems prevailed over the North Atlantic in the first half of the Holocene while low-pressure systems resulted from baroclinic instabilities of the atmosphere dominate during the second half, favoring the growth of glaciers in Scandinavia by a better snowfall in winter and cooler summers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hydroclimatic Events in Regions Subject to Rainfall Oscillation)
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