Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “natural climate variability”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Early Holocene cold snaps and their expression in the moraine record of the eastern European Alps

Glaciers preserve climate variations in their geological and geomorphological records, which makes them prime candidates for climate reconstructions. Investigating the glacier–climate system over the past millennia is particularly relevant first because the amplitude and frequency of natural climate variability during the Holocene provides the climatic context against which modern, human-induced climate change must be assessed. Second, the transition from the last glacial to the current interglacial promises important insights into the climate system during warming, which is of particular interest with respect to ongoing climate change. Evidence of stable ice margin positions that record cooling during the past 12 kyr are preserved in two glaciated valleys of the Silvretta Massif in the eastern European Alps, the Jamtal (JAM) and the Laraintal (LAR). We mapped and dated moraines in these catchments including historical ridges using beryllium-10 surface exposure dating (10Be SED) techniques and correlate resulting moraine formation intervals with climate proxy records to evaluate the spatial and temporal scale of these cold phases. The new geochronologies indicate the formation of moraines during the early Holocene (EH), ca. 11.0 ± 0.7 ka (n = 19). Boulder ages along historical moraines (n = 6) suggest at least two glacier advances during the Little Ice Age (LIA; ca. 1250–1850 CE) around 1300 CE and in the second half of the 18th century. An earlier advance to the same position may have occurred around 500 CE. The Jamtal and Laraintal moraine chronologies provide evidence that millennial-scale EH warming was superimposed by centennial-scale cooling. The timing of EH moraine formation coincides with brief temperature drops identified in local and regional paleoproxy records, most prominently with the Preboreal Oscillation (PBO) and is consistent with moraine deposition in other catchments in the European Alps and in the Arctic region. This consistency points to cooling beyond the local scale and therefore a regional or even hemispheric climate driver. Freshwater input sourced from the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), which changed circulation patterns in the North Atlantic, is a plausible explanation for EH cooling and moraine formation in the Nordic region and in Europe.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS2002

Mapping the Potential for Eolian Surface Activity in Grasslands of the High Plains using Landsat Images

There are over 100,000 square kilometers of eolian sand dunes and sand sheets in the High Plains of the central United States. These land-forms may be unstable and may reactivate again as a result of land-use, climate change, or natural climatic variability. The main goal of this thesis was to develop a model that could be used to map an estimate of future dune activity. Multi-temporal calibrated Landsats 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and 7 Enhanced Thematic Map per Plus (ETM+) NDVI imagery were used in conjunction with the CENTURY vegetation model to correlate vegetation cover to climatic variability. This allows the creation of a predicted vegetation map which, combined with current wind and soil data, was used to create a potential sand transport map for range land in the High Plains under drought conditions.

Gutmann, Ethan Dain↗
NASA NTRS2017

Applications of VIC for Climate Land Cover Change Imapacts

Study focuses on the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), the LMB is an economically and ecologically important region: (1) One of the largest exporters of rice and fish products, (2) Within top three most biodiverse river basins in the world. Natural climate variability plays an important role in water supply within the region: (1) Short-term climate variability (ENSO, MJO), (2) Long-term climate variability (climate change). Projections of climate change show there will be a decrease in water availability world wide which has implications for food security and ecology. Additional studies show there may be socioeconomic turmoil due to water wars and food security in developing regions such as the Mekong Basin. Southeast Asia has experienced major changes in land use and land cover from 1980 – 2000. Major economic reforms resulting in shift from subsistence farming to market-based agricultural production. Changes in land cover continue to occur which have an important role within the land surface aspect of hydrology.

remote sensing↗
NASA NTRS2010

CLARREO Cornerstone of the Earth Observing System: Measuring Decadal Change Through Accurate Emitted Infrared and Reflected Solar Spectra and Radio Occultation

The Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) is one of four Tier 1 missions recommended by the recent NRC Decadal Survey report on Earth Science and Applications from Space (NRC, 2007). The CLARREO mission addresses the need to provide accurate, broadly acknowledged climate records that are used to enable validated long-term climate projections that become the foundation for informed decisions on mitigation and adaptation policies that address the effects of climate change on society. The CLARREO mission accomplishes this critical objective through rigorous SI traceable decadal change observations that are sensitive to many of the key uncertainties in climate radiative forcings, responses, and feedbacks that in turn drive uncertainty in current climate model projections. These same uncertainties also lead to uncertainty in attribution of climate change to anthropogenic forcing. For the first time CLARREO will make highly accurate, global, SI-traceable decadal change observations sensitive to the most critical, but least understood, climate forcings, responses, and feedbacks. The CLARREO breakthrough is to achieve the required levels of accuracy and traceability to SI standards for a set of observations sensitive to a wide range of key decadal change variables. The required accuracy levels are determined so that climate trend signals can be detected against a background of naturally occurring variability. Climate system natural variability therefore determines what level of accuracy is overkill, and what level is critical to obtain. In this sense, the CLARREO mission requirements are considered optimal from a science value perspective. The accuracy for decadal change traceability to SI standards includes uncertainties associated with instrument calibration, satellite orbit sampling, and analysis methods. Unlike most space missions, the CLARREO requirements are driven not by the instantaneous accuracy of the measurements, but by accuracy in the large time/space scale averages that are key to understanding decadal changes.

Sandford, Stephen P.↗
NASA NTRS1981

A stochastic-dynamical approach to the study of the natural variability of the climate

A method, suggested by Leith (1975), which employed stochastic-dynamic forecasts obtained from a general circulation model in such a way as to satisfy the definition of climatic noise, was used to validate assumptions accounting for the effects of external influences in estimating the climatic noise. Two assumptions were investigated: (1) that the weather fluctuations can be represented as a Markov process, and (2) that changing external conditions do not influence the atmosphere's statistical properties on short time scales. The general circulation model's simulation of the daily weather fluctuations was generated by performing integrations with prescribed climatological boundary conditions for random initial atmospheric states, with resulting dynamical forecasts providing an ensemble of simulated data for the autoregressive modeling of weather fluctuations. To estimate the climatic noise from the observational data (consisting of hourly values of sea level pressure and surface temperature at 54 U.S. stations for the month of January for the years 1949-1975) use of the short time-scale assumption is made. The simulated and observed data were found not to be consistent with either white noise or a Markov process of weather fluctuations. Good agreement was found between the results of the hypothetical testing of the simulated and the observed surface temperatures; and only partial support was found for the short time-scale assumption, i.e., for sea level pressure.

Straus, D. M.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Advancing Measurements and Understanding of the Rate and Structure of Atmospheric Warming

The rate and geographic pattern of atmospheric warming are key indicators of historical climate change and play a role in modulating future changes in Earth’s climate. The past and future evolution of atmospheric temperature is simulated using global climate models while observational estimates of past warming are derived from satellite microwave measurements. Individual climate models simulate widely varying rates of past and future atmospheric warming and most model simulations exhibit greater tropospheric (lowest ~10 km of atmosphere) temperature change than satellite observations between 1979 and 2020. This project examined intermodel differences in the pattern of atmospheric warming and how these differences influence climate feedbacks that can amplify or damp the rate of global surface warming. A key result is that climate model representation of the current climate can influence climate feedbacks and the simulation of future changes in climate. Another focus of this project was to analyze how models respond to different input datasets, such as volcanic aerosols or sea surface temperature (in atmosphere-only simulations). We find that different prescribed inputs can affect simulated changes in atmospheric temperature, even though “input uncertainty” is often unconsidered in model-observational comparisons. A final focus of this research project was to consider the influence of natural internal climate variability on satellite era changes in climate. Although the Earth is warming substantially due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, the observed warming rate can be modulated by natural variations in the Earth’s climate. We find that natural climate variability has slowed the rate of tropical tropospheric warming, which explains model-satellite differences in the rate of tropospheric warming.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Intrinsic Century-Scale Variability in Tropical Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures and Their Influence on Western US Hydroclimate

Hydroclimate variability of the southwest United States (SWUS) is influenced by the tropical Pacific Ocean, particularly through the teleconnection to El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is expected to be altered by climate change. Natural variability in this teleconnection has not been robustly quantified, complicating the detection of anthropogenic climate change. Here, we use a linear inverse model (LIM) to quantify natural variability in the ENSO-SWUS teleconnection. The LIM yields realistic teleconnection patterns with century-scale variability comparable to simulations from the Last Millennium Ensemble project and the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6. The variability quantified by the LIM illuminates two aspects of our understanding of ENSO and its impacts: the inherent statistics of the observable system can produce century-long periods with a wide range of correlations to SWUS hydroclimate, including nonsignificant correlations, and thus that detecting changes in ENSO-related hydroclimate variability is challenging in a changing climate.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS2018

Climate and the Global Famine of 1876-78

From 1875 to 1878, concurrent multiyear droughts in Asia, Brazil, and Africa, referred to as the Great Drought, caused widespread crop failures, catalyzing the so-called Global Famine, which had fatalities exceeding 50 million people and long-lasting societal consequences. Observations, paleoclimate reconstructions, and climate model simulations are used 1) to demonstrate the severity and characterize the evolution of drought across different regions, and 2) to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving its multiyear persistence. Severe or record-setting droughts occurred on continents in both hemispheres and in multiple seasons, with the "Monsoon Asia" region being the hardest hit, experiencing the single most intense and the second most expansive drought in the last 800 years. The extreme severity, duration, and extent of this global event is associated with an extraordinary combination of preceding cool tropical Pacific conditions (1870-76), a record-breaking El Nino (1877-78), a record strong Indian Ocean dipole (1877), and record warm North Atlantic Ocean (1878) conditions. Composites of historical analogs and two sets of ensemble simulations - one forced with global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and another forced with tropical Pacific SST - were used to distinguish the role of the extreme conditions in different ocean basins. While the drought in most regions was largely driven by the tropical Pacific SST conditions, an extreme positive phase of the Indian Ocean dipole and warm North Atlantic SSTs, both likely aided by the strong El Nino in 1877-78, intensified and prolonged droughts in Australia and Brazil, respectively, and extended the impact to northern and southeastern Africa. Climatic conditions that caused the Great Drought and Global Famine arose from natural variability, and their recurrence, with hydrological impacts intensified by global warming, could again potentially undermine global food security.

multi-year drought↗
NASA NTRS2019

Climate Change Amplification of Natural Drought Variability: The Historic Mid-Twentieth Century North American Drought in a Warmer World

In the mid-twentieth century (1948-1957), North America experienced a severe drought forced by cold tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs). If these SSTs recurred, it would likely cause another drought, but in a world substantially warmer than the one in which the original event took place. We use a 20-member ensemble of the GISS climate model to investigate the drought impacts of a repetition of the mid-twentieth century SST anomalies in a significantly warmer world. Using observed SSTs and mid-twentieth century forcings (Hist-DRGHT), the ensemble reproduces the observed precipitation deficits during the cold season (October–March) across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Mexico and during the warm season (April–September) in the Southern Plains and the Southeast. Under analogous SST forcing and enhanced warming (Fut-DRGHT, ≈3 K above pre-industrial), cold season precipitation deficits are ameliorated in the Southwest and Southern Plains and intensified in the Southeast, while during the warm season precipitation deficits are enhanced across North America. This occurs primarily from greenhouse gas forced trends in mean precipitation, rather than changes in SST teleconnections. Cold season runoff deficits in Fut-DRGHT are significantly amplified over the Southeast, but otherwise similar to Hist-DRGHT over the Southwest and Southern Plains. In the warm season, however, runoff and soil moisture deficits during Fut-DRGHT are significantly amplified across the southern US, a consequence of enhanced precipitation deficits and increased evaporative losses due to warming. Our study highlights how internal variability and greenhouse gas forced trends in hydroclimate are likely to interact over North America, including how changes in both precipitation and evaporative demand will affect future drought.

Benjamin I Cook↗
DOE OSTI2022

Internal variability and forcing influence model–satellite differences in the rate of tropical tropospheric warming

Climate-model simulations exhibit approximately two times more tropical tropospheric warming than satellite observations since 1979. The causes of this difference are not fully understood and are poorly quantified. Here, we apply machine learning to relate the patterns of surface-temperature change to the forced and unforced components of tropical tropospheric warming. This approach allows us to disentangle the forced and unforced change in the model-simulated temperature of the midtroposphere (TMT). In applying the climate-model-trained machine-learning framework to observations, we estimate that external forcing has produced a tropical TMT trend of 0.25 ± 0.08 K⋅decade −1 between 1979 and 2014, but internal variability has offset this warming by 0.07 ± 0.07 K⋅decade −1 . Using the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2) large ensemble, we also find that a discontinuity in the variability of prescribed biomass-burning aerosol emissions artificially enhances simulated tropical TMT change by 0.04 K⋅decade −1 . The magnitude of this aerosol-forcing bias will vary across climate models, but since the latest generation of climate models all use the same emissions dataset, the bias may systematically enhance climate-model trends over the satellite era. Our results indicate that internal variability and forcing uncertainties largely explain differences in satellite-versus-model warming and are important considerations when evaluating climate models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1999

Vegetation Interaction Enhances Interdecadal Climate Variability in the Sahel

The role of naturally varying vegetation in influencing the climate variability in the Sahel is explored in a coupled atmosphere-land-vegetation model. The Sahel rainfall variability is influenced by sea surface temperature (SST) variations in the oceans. Land-surface feedback is found to increase this variability both on interannual and interdecadal time scales. Interactive vegetation enhances the interdecadal variation significantly, but can reduce year to year variability due to a phase lag introduced by the relatively slow vegetation adjustment time. Variations in vegetation accompany the changes in rainfall, in particular, the multi-decadal drying trend from the 1950s to the 80s.

Zeng, Ning↗
DOE OSTI2023

Pacific decadal oscillation causes fewer near-equatorial cyclones in the North Indian Ocean

Tropical cyclones do not form easily near the equator but can intensify rapidly, leaving little time for preparation. We investigate the number of near-equatorial (originating between 5°N and 11°N) tropical cyclones over the north Indian Ocean during post-monsoon season (October to December) over the past 60 years. The study reveals a marked 43% decline in the number of such cyclones in recent decades (1981–2010) compared to earlier (1951–1980). Here, we show this decline in tropical cyclone frequency is primarily due to the weakened low-level vorticity modulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and increased vertical wind shear. In the presence of low-latitude basin-wide warming and a favorable phase of the PDO, both the intensity and frequency of such cyclones are expected to increase. Such dramatic and unique changes in tropical cyclonic activity due to the interplay between natural variability and climate change call for appropriate planning and mitigation strategies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1984

Carbon monoxide in the earth's atmosphere - Increasing trend

The results of an analysis of more than 60,000 atmospheric measurements of carbon monoxide taken over 3-1/2 years at Cape Meares, Oregon (45 deg N, 125 deg W), indicate that the background concentration of this gas is increasing. The rate of increase, although uncertain, is about 6 percent per year on average. Human activities are the likely cause of a substantial portion of this observed increase; however, because of the short atmospheric lifetime of carbon monoxide and the relatively few years of observations, fluctuations of sources and sinks related to the natural variability of climate may have affected the observed trend. Increased carbon monoxide may deplete tropospheric hydroxyl radicals, slowing down the removal of dozens of man-made and anthropogenic trace gases and thus indirectly affecting the earth's climate and possibly the stratospheric ozone layer.

Khalil, M. A. K.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Precipitation Recycling

The water cycle regulates and reflects natural variability in climate at the regional and global scales. Large-scale human activities that involve changes in land cover, such as tropical deforestation, are likely to modify climate through changes in the water cycle. In order to understand, and hopefully be able to predict, the extent of these potential global and regional changes, we need first to understand how the water cycle works. In the past, most of the research in hydrology focused on the land branch of the water cycle, with little attention given to the atmospheric branch. The study of precipitation recycling which is defined as the contribution of local evaporation to local precipitation, aims at understanding hydrologic processes in the atmospheric branch of the water cycle. Simply stated, any study on precipitation recycling is about how the atmospheric branch of the water cycle works, namely, what happens to water vapor molecules after they evaporate from the surface, and where will they precipitate?

Eltahir, Elfatih A. B.↗
NASA NTRS2022

Assessing Progress Toward the Paris Climate Agreement From Space

Concentration monitoring with satellite observations of the “atmospheric stocks” of greenhouse gases offers ways to assess the impact of human activity, natural processes, climate variability, and their interaction beyond what is possible with emissions monitoring alone.

IPCC 2014↗
DOE OSTI2021

Evaluation of the Large-Scale and Regional Climatic Response Across North Africa to Natural Variability in Oceanic Modes and Terrestrial Vegetation Among the CMIP5 Models

Hydrologic variability is a serious threat to the poverty-stricken regions of North Africa. Meanwhile, the scientific community struggles to attribute these extreme climatic episodes to specific oceanic and land drivers. Prior modeling studies have not assessed simulated feedbacks over North Africa against an established observational benchmark, so their results are considered as untested, model-specific findings. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase Five (CMIP5) archive represents the state-of-the-art in climate projections, with most CMIP5 models now containing interactive vegetation phenology; however, there have been no studies to date of their simulated vegetation feedbacks. The capability of CMIP5 models at accurately simulating the forcing of both sea-surface temperature (SST) and regional leaf area index (LAI) anomalies on North African climate needs to be a key consideration in assessing the models’ overall credibility and determining appropriate model weighting for developing climate projections. The Generalized Equilibrium Feedback Assessment (GEFA) is a promising statistical method, which can be applied to either model output or observations, for isolating the local and remote impacts of individual oceanic or terrestrial forcings on regional climate. We performed a combined observational and modeling assessment of land-ocean-atmosphere interactions across the distinct ecological and moisture gradients of North Africa. We evaluated and demonstrated the reliability of the GEFA statistical method over North Africa using the Community Earth System Model (CESM), applied GEFA to observational data to quantify the observed forcing of ocean basin SST anomalies and regional LAI anomalies on North African climate, evaluated the CMIP5 models’ performance in terms of representing these key observed feedbacks, and formulated CMIP5 feedback performance metrics for weighting North African climate projections. Our study represented the first attempt to separate the observed roles of oceanic and vegetation feedbacks across North Africa, the first systematic assessment and intercomparison of land-ocean-atmosphere feedbacks in CMIP5, and the first exploration of vegetation feedbacks among CMIP5 models. The following work was accomplished. (1) The team generated 14 scientific publications and 30 presentations based on the DOE-funded research. (2) A stepwise version of the GEFA statistical method was developed in which unimportant forcings were dropped to increase the reliability of the results. (3) SGEFA was successfully validated through experiments with CESM in terms of its ability to isolate the atmospheric responses to individual oceanic or land forcings. (4) Observational evidence was revealed for the Sahel’s positive vegetation-rainfall feedback on the seasonal to interannual time scale, and it was attributed to a moisture recycling mechanism rather than an albedo mechanism. (5) An approach with SGEFA was developed in which the individual contributions of soil moisture versus vegetation forcings could be separated, revealing that the former forcing outweighed the latter for sub-Saharan Africa. (6) Tropical ocean temperatures were found to be key regulators of pan-tropical vegetation variability, especially for arid and semi-arid regions, including sub-Saharan Africa. (7) The CMIP5 models largely underestimated the importance of land feedbacks across the Sahel. (8) The general consensus among CMIP5 models indicates, for the late 21st century, a diminished seasonal predictability of sub-Saharan African regional climate and an elevated role of the land surface compared to oceanic drivers in regulating regional climate variability. (9) Land-ocean-atmosphere interactions were demonstrated to be key contributors to the seasonal predictability of African wildfire activity. (10) The El Djouf was determined to be of greater importance than the Bodélé depression in terms of providing trans-Atlantic dust transport to the Americas.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Dominant controls of cold-season precipitation variability over the high mountains of Asia

A robust understanding of the sub-seasonal cold season (November–March) precipitation variability over the High Mountains of Asia (HMA) is lacking. Here, we identify dynamic and thermodynamic pathways through which natural modes of climate variability establish their teleconnections over the HMA. First, we identify evaporative sources that contribute to the cold season precipitation over the HMA and surrounding areas. The predominant moisture contribution comes from the mid-latitude regions, including the Mediterranean/Caspian Seas and Mediterranean land. Second, we establish that several tropical and extratropical forcings display a sub-seasonally fluctuating influence on precipitation distribution over the region during the cold season. Many of them varyingly interact, so their impacts cannot be explained independently or at seasonal timescales. Lastly, a single set of evaporative sources is not identifiable as the key determinant in propagating a remote teleconnection because the sources of moisture anomalies depend on the pattern of sub-seasonally varying dynamical forcing in the atmosphere.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗