Month: June 2018

Estimating the Effects of Vertical Wind Shear on Orographic Gravity Wave Drag

Holly TurnerLeave a comment

Orographic gravity waves occur when air flows over mountains in stably stratified conditions. The flow of air creates a pressure imbalance across the mountain, so a force is exerted on the mountain in the same direction as the flow. An equal and opposite force is exerted back on the atmosphere, and this is gravity wave drag (GWD).

GWD must be parametrized in Global Circulation Models (GCMs), as it is important for large-scale flow. The first parametrization was formulated by Palmer et al. (1986) to reduce a systematic westerly bias. The current parametrization was formulated by Lott and Miller (1997) and partitions the calculation into 2 parts (see figure 1):

  1. The mountain waves. This is calculated by averaging the wind, Brunt-Väisälä frequency and fluid density in a layer between 1 and 2 standard deviations of the subgrid-scale orography above the mean orography.
  2. The blocked flow. This is based on an interpretation of the non-dimensional mountain height.
Fig 1
Figure from Lott and Miller (1997).

The parametrization does not include the effects of wind shear. Wind shear is a change in the wind with height and it alters the vertical wave length of gravity waves and so alters the drag. It has been shown (Teixeira et al., 2004; Teixeira and Miranda, 2006) that a uniform shear profile (i.e. a change in the magnitude of the wind with height) decreases the drag whereas a profile in which the wind turns with height increases the drag. This effect was seen by Miranda et al. (2009) to have the greatest impact over Antarctica, where drag enhancement was seen to occur all year with a peak of ~50% during JJA. Figure 2 shows this.

Fig 2
Figure 2: Annual mean linear GWD stress (1992-2001). Vectors show the surface stress with shear. Shading indicates the anomaly of the modulus of the surface stress due to shear. Computed from ERA-40 data. Taken from Miranda et al. (2009).

The aim of this work is to test the impact of the inclusion of shear effects on the parametrization. The first stage of this is to test the sensitivity of the shear correction to the height in the atmosphere at which the necessary derivatives are approximated. We carry out calculations using 2 different reference heights:

  1. The top of the boundary layer (BLH). This allows us to avoid the effects of boundary layer turbulence, which are not important in this case as they are unrelated to the dynamics of mountain waves.
  2. The middle of the layer between 1 and 2 standard deviations of the sub-grid scale orography (SDH). This is the nominal height used in previous studies and in the parametrization.

All figures shown below focus on Antarctica and are averaged over all JJAs for the decade 2006-2015. We are interested in Antarctica and the JJA season for the reasons highlighted above. All calculations are carried out using ERA-Interim reanalysis data.

We first consider the enhancement assuming axisymmetric orography. The advantage of this is that it considerably simplifies the correction due to terms related to the anisotropy becoming constant (see Teixeira et al, 2004). Figure 3 shows this correction calculated using both reference heights. We can see that the enhancement is greater when the SDH is used.

Fig 3
Figure 3: Drag enhancement over Antarctica with shear corrections computed at the BLH (left) and SDH (right), during JJAs for the decade 2006-2015, using axisymmetric orography.

We now consider the enhancement using mountains with an elliptical horizontal cross-section. This is how the real orography is represented in the parametrization. Again, we see that the enhancement is greater when the SDH is used (figure 4).

Fig 4
Figure 4: Drag enhancement (left) and enhancement of drag stress (in Pa) (right) over Antarctica with shear corrections calculated at the BLH (top) and SDH (bottom), during JJAs for the decade 2006-2015, using orography with an elliptical horizontal cross-section.

It is interesting to note that at both heights the enhancement is greater when axisymmetric orography is used. This occurs because, in the case of elliptical mountains, the shear vector is predominantly aligned along the orography, resulting is weaker enhancement (see figure 5).

Fig 5
Figure 5: Histograms of the orientation of the shear vector relative to the short axis of the orography over Antarctica for JJAs during the decade 2006-2015, using the BLH (left) and SDH (right).

We also investigate the fraction of times at which the terms related to wind profile curvature (i.e. those containing second derivatives) dominate the drag correction. This tells us the fraction of time for which curvature matters for the drag. We see that second derivatives dominate over much of Antarctica for a high proportion of the time (see figure 6).

Fig 6
Figure 6: Fraction of the time at which terms with second derivatives dominate the drag correction relative to terms with first derivatives over orography with an elliptical horizontal cross-section, for JJAs during the decade 2006-2015, calculated using the BLH (left) and SDH (right).

In summary, the main findings are as follows:

  • The drag is quantitatively robust to changes in calculation height, with the geographical distribution, seasonality and sign essentially the same.
  • The drag is considerably enhanced when the SDH is used rather than the BLH.
  • Investigation of the relative magnitudes of terms containing first and second derivatives in the drag correction indicates that second derivatives (i.e. curvature terms) dominate in a large proportion of Antarctica for a large fraction of time. This leads to an average enhancement of the drag which is larger over shorter time intervals.
  • Use of an axisymmetric orography profile causes considerable overestimation of the shear effects. This is due to the shear vector being predominantly aligned along the mountains in the case of the orography with an elliptical horizontal cross-section.

These results highlight the need to ‘tune’ the calculation by identifying the optimum height in the atmosphere at which to approximate the derivatives. This work is ongoing. We expect the optimum height to be that at which the shear has the greatest impact on the surface drag.

References:

Lott F. and Miller M., 1997, A new subgrid-scale orographic drag parametrization: Its formulation and testing, Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 123: 101–127.

Miranda P., Martins J. and Teixeira M., 2009, Assessing wind profile effects on the global atmospheric torque, Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 135: 807–814.

Teixeira M. and Miranda P., 2006, A linear model of gravity wave drag for hydrostatic sheared flow over elliptical mountains, Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 132: 2439–2458.

Teixeira M., Miranda P. and Valente M., 2004, An analytical model of mountain wave drag for wind profiles with shear and curvature, J. Atmos. Sci., 61: 1040–1054.

Visiting Scientist 2018

Matthew Priestley1 Comment

With thanks to Kaja Milczewska

Every year the PhD students in the Meteorology Department invite a distinguished scientist to spend a few days with us. This year, the students voted for the Visiting Scientist to be Prof. Olivia Romppainnen-Martius, who came to the Department from 4th-7th June 2018.

Prof. Romppainen-Martius is based at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, as an Associate Professor researching climate impacts.

Olivia’s research interests broadly covers mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics, with topics from how blocking events are precursors Sudden Stratospheric Warming events, to more impact based work on heavy Alpine precipitation and extreme hail in and around Switzerland. Her main research areas can be summarised as dynamics of short-term climate variation, forecasting and statistics of high-impact weather events and mid-latitude weather systems. More about her research and publications can be found here.

As is usual for the start of our distinguished visitor’s stay, Prof. Romppainen-Martius’s visit began with an introduction from Prof. Sue Gray during the coffee reception. This was immediately followed by a special seminar, titled “Recent hail research in Switzerland – the challenges and delights of complex orography and crowd-sourced data”. Her talk covered various probabilistic measures for predicting hail in the mountainous region that is Switzerland and how the climatology of these identified events is strongly linked with these mountainous areas. Verification of these predictions has recently been achieved through observer reports via the MeteoSwiss app, where observers record the time, location, and size of the hail they have observed.

The day was rounded off with a social at Zero Degrees, with Olivia and many PhD students engaging in fruitful conversation over pizza and beer.

After a busy first day, the second day of her visit included individual meetings with both research staff and students, and attending the Mesoscale and HHH (Hoskins-Half-Hour) research groups. On Wednesday 5th July, some PhD students presented their research to Olivia to showcase the breadth of topics covered in the Meteorology department. Interestingly, one of the talks ‘reliably’ informed us that Arctic sea-ice melting meant it was now possible to go on holiday cruises to see penguins. Clearly these penguins are on holiday too…

Slide1

At the weekly PhD Group meeting, Prof. Romppainen-Martius gave some useful advice on careers in academic research and the pathway to her current position – which of course includes lots of skiing. Additionally, she advertised some post-doctoral funding opportunities in Switzerland and Germany, which was sure to encourage the keen skiers in the crowd. This was an engaging open discussion about the realities of research life, and attendance was made all the better by biscuits from the group leaders Beth and Liam.

On the last day of her visit (Thursday 8th June), Olivia gave her second departmental seminar titled “Periods of recurrent synoptic-scale Rossby waves and associated persistent moderate temperature extremes”. The seminar was followed by a well-attended leaving reception, which concluded Olivia’s visit to our department. The students prepared a photo frame and other England themed items as a gift, to thank our distinguished scientist for accepting the invitation to spend an inspiring week with us.  Unfortunately, Olivia could not stay for the ‘world-renowned’ annual Met BBQ and Barn Dance on the Friday, but nonetheless we hope that she enjoyed her visit as much as we did!

Olivia

Top websites for weather enthusiasts!

Rebecca Couchman-CrookLeave a comment

If you’re searching for some weather-related procrastination, then look no further – we’ve got just what you need! Here’s our top picks for your coffee break-browsing:

  • Want a cool animated globe that shows you wind, temperature and aerosols, amongst other things? Null School is for you!

nullschool

  • Severe Weather Europe has photos and videos of awesome hailstorms, supercells and more.
  • If you’re wanting wind maps – then Windy.com is the place to go.

windy

  • Space weather more your thing? Then help with some research and find Solar Storms. Read more about the science in Shannon’s blog.
  • If you’ve been following all the recent thunderstorms, then check out the locations of all the lightning, updated in near real-time at Blitzortung.

lightning

  • The Met Office website has forecasts and pollen counts, but also cool things like podcasts about the weather.
  • Real-time satellite imagery is available at sat24 for the UK and Europe.

Sat24

WXChartspic.PNG

  • For articles on climate change and environmental science, Carbon Brief  is the answer.

 

Hierarchies of Models

Lina BoljkaLeave a comment

With thanks to Inna Polichtchouk.

General circulation models (GCMs) of varying complexity are used in atmospheric and oceanic sciences to study different atmospheric processes and to simulate response of climate to climate change and other forcings.

However, Held (2005) warned the climate community that the gap between understanding and simulating atmospheric and oceanic processes is becoming wider. He stressed the use of model hierarchies for improved understanding of the atmosphere and oceans (Fig. 1). Often at the bottom of the hierarchy lie the well-understood, idealized, one- or two-layer models.  In the middle of the hierarchy lie multi-layer models, which omit certain processes such as land-ocean-atmosphere interactions or moist physics. And finally, at the top of the hierarchy lie fully coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models that are used for climate projections. Such model hierarchies are already well developed in other sciences (Held 2005), such as molecular biology, where studying less complex animals (e.g. mice) infers something about the more complex humans (through evolution).

Model_hierarchies_Shaw_etal2016
Figure 1: Model hierarchy of midlatitude atmosphere (as used for studying storm tracks). The simplest models are on the left and the most complex models are on the right. Bottom panels show eddy kinetic energy (EKE, contours) and precipitation (shading) with increase in model hierarchy (left-to-right): No precipitation in a dry core model (left), zonally homogeneous EKE and precipitation in an aquaplanet model (middle), and zonally varying EKE and precipitation in the most complex model (right). Source: Shaw et al. (2016), Fig. B2.

Model hierarchies have now become an important research tool to further our understanding of the climate system [see, e.g., Polvani et al. (2017), Jeevanjee et al. (2017), Vallis et al. (2018)]. This approach allows us to delineate most important processes responsible for circulation response to climate change (e.g., mid-latitude storm track shift, widening of tropical belt etc.), to perform hypothesis testing, and to assess robustness of results in different configurations.

In my PhD, I have extensively used the model hierarchies concept to understand mid-latitude tropospheric dynamics (Fig. 1). One-layer barotropic and two-layer quasi-geostrophic models are often used as a first step to understand large-scale dynamics and to establish the importance of barotropic and baroclinic processes (also discussed in my previous blog post). Subsequently, more realistic “dry” non-linear multi-layer models with simple treatment for boundary layer and radiation [the so-called “Held & Suarez” setup, first introduced in Held and Suarez (1994)] can be used to study zonally homogeneous mid-latitude dynamics without complicating the setup with physical parametrisations (e.g. moist processes), or the full range of ocean-land-ice-atmosphere interactions. For example, I have successfully used the Held & Suarez setup to test the robustness of the annular mode variability (see my previous blog post) to different model climatologies (Boljka et al., 2018). I found that baroclinic annular mode timescale and its link to the barotropic annular mode is sensitive to model climatology. This can have an impact on climate variability in a changing climate.

Additional complexity can be introduced to the multi-layer dry models by adding moist processes and physical parametrisations in the so-called “aquaplanet” setup [e.g. Neale and Hoskins (2000)]. The aquaplanet setup allows us to elucidate the role of moist processes and parametrisations on zonally homogeneous dynamics. For example, mid-latitude cyclones tend to be stronger in moist atmospheres.

To study effects of zonal asymmetries on the mid-latitude dynamics, localized heating or topography can be further introduced to the aquaplanet and Held & Suarez setup to force large-scale stationary waves, reproducing the south-west to north-east tilts in the Northern Hemisphere storm tracks (bottom left panel in Fig. 1). This setup has helped me elucidate the differences between the zonally homogeneous and zonally inhomogeneous atmospheres, where the planetary scale (stationary) waves and their interplay with the synoptic eddies (cyclones) become increasingly important for the mid-latitude storm track dynamics and variability on different temporal and spatial scales.

Even further complexity can be achieved by coupling atmospheric models to the dynamic ocean and/or land and ice models (coupled atmosphere-ocean or atmosphere only GCMs, in Fig. 1), all of which bring the model closer to reality. However, interpreting results from such complex models is very difficult without having first studied the hierarchy of models as too many processes are acting simultaneously in such fully coupled models.  Further insights can also be gained by improving the theoretical (mathematical) understanding of the atmospheric processes by using a similar hierarchical approach [see e.g. Boljka and Shepherd (2018)].

References:

Boljka, L. and T.G. Shepherd, 2018: A multiscale asymptotic theory of extratropical wave–mean flow interaction. J. Atmos. Sci., 75, 1833–1852, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-17-0307.1 .

Boljka, L., T.G. Shepherd, and M. Blackburn, 2018: On the boupling between barotropic and baroclinic modes of extratropical atmospheric variability. J. Atmos. Sci., 75, 1853–1871, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-17-0370.1 .

Held, I. M., 2005: The gap between simulation and understanding in climate modeling. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 86, 1609 – 1614.

Held, I. M. and M. J. Suarez, 1994: A proposal for the intercomparison of the dynamical cores of atmospheric general circulation models. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 75, 1825–1830.

Jeevanjee, N., Hassanzadeh, P., Hill, S., Sheshadri, A., 2017: A perspective on climate model hierarchies. JAMES, 9, 1760-1771.

Neale, R. B., and B. J. Hoskins, 2000: A standard test for AGCMs including their physical parametrizations: I: the proposal. Atmosph. Sci. Lett., 1, 101–107.

Polvani, L. M., A. C. Clement, B. Medeiros, J. J. Benedict, and I. R. Simpson (2017), When less is more: Opening the door to simpler climate models. EOS, 98.

Shaw, T. A., M. Baldwin, E. A. Barnes, R. Caballero, C. I. Garfinkel, Y-T. Hwang, C. Li, P. A. O’Gorman, G. Riviere, I R. Simpson, and A. Voigt, 2016: Storm track processes and the opposing influences of climate change. Nature Geoscience, 9, 656–664.

Vallis, G. K., Colyer, G., Geen, R., Gerber, E., Jucker, M., Maher, P., Paterson, A., Pietschnig, M., Penn, J., and Thomson, S. I., 2018: Isca, v1.0: a framework for the global modelling of the atmospheres of Earth and other planets at varying levels of complexity. Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 843-859.