Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Liang, Y., Lo, M., Lan, C., Seo, H., Ummenhofer, C. C., Yeager, S., Wu, R., & Steffen, J. D. Amplified seasonal cycle in hydroclimate over the Amazon river basin and its plume region. Nature Communications, 11(1), (2020): 4390, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18187-0.
Description:
The Amazon river basin receives ~2000 mm of precipitation annually and contributes ~17% of global river freshwater input to the oceans; its hydroclimatic variations can exert profound impacts on the marine ecosystem in the Amazon plume region (APR) and have potential far-reaching influences on hydroclimate over the tropical Atlantic. Here, we show that an amplified seasonal cycle of Amazonia precipitation, represented by the annual difference between maximum and minimum values, during the period 1979–2018, leads to enhanced seasonalities in both Amazon river discharge and APR ocean salinity. An atmospheric moisture budget analysis shows that these enhanced seasonal cycles are associated with similar amplifications in the atmospheric vertical and horizontal moisture advections. Hierarchical sensitivity experiments using global climate models quantify the relationships of these enhanced seasonalities. The results suggest that an intensified hydroclimatological cycle may develop in the Amazonia atmosphere-land-ocean coupled system, favouring more extreme terrestrial and marine conditions.
Description:
M.-H.L., C.-W.L., and R.-J.W. are supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan under grant 106-2111-M-002-010-MY4. H.S. and J.D.S. are grateful for support from NOAA NA19OAR4310376 and NA17OAR4310255. C.C.U. acknowledges support from the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant OCE-1663704. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. We thank Dr. Young-Oh Kwon at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dr. Who Kim at NCAR for discussions about the ocean model experiment design. We thank Dr. Mehnaz Rashid at National Taiwan University and Wen-Yin Wu at the University of Texas at Austin in helping generate the high-resolution Amazon river mask. We also thank Dr. Gael Forget at Massachusetts Institue of Technology for comments on using ECCO and other ocean-state estimate products.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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