Diagnosing anomalous characteristics of atmospheric water cycle structure during seasonal-scale drought events:A case study in middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River

Anomalous characteristics of the atmospheric water cycle structure are highly significant to the mechanisms of seasonal-scale meteorological droughts.They also play an important role in the identification of indicative predictors of droughts.To better understand the causes of seasonal meteorological droughts in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River(MLRYR),characteristics of the atmospheric water cycle structure at different drought stages were determined using standardized anomalies.The results showed that the total column water vapor(TCWV)was anomalously low during drought occurrence periods.In contrast,there were no anomalous signals at the drought persistence and recovery stages in the MLRYR.Moreover,there was no significant temporal correlation between the TCWV anomaly and seasonal-scale drought index(the 3-month standardized precipitation index(SPI_(3))).During drought events,water vapor that mainly originated from the Bay of Bengal was transported southwest of the MLRYR.Meanwhile,the anomalous signal of water vapor transport was negative at the drought appearance stage.At the drought persistence stage,the negative anomalous signal was the most significant.Water vapor flux divergence in the MLRYR showed significant positive anomalous signals during drought events,and the signal intensity shifted from an increasing to a decreasing trend at different drought stages.In addition,a significant positive correlation existed between the anomaly of water vapor flux divergence and regional SPI_(3).Overall,water vapor flux divergence is more predictive of droughts in the MLRYR.

Numerical Experiments on the Spin-up Time for Seasonal-Scale Regional Climate Modeling

In this paper, the numerical experiments on the issue of spin-up time for seasonal-scale regional climate modeling were conducted with the newly Regional Climate Model （RegCM3）, in the case of the abnormal climate event during the summer of 1998 in China. To test the effect of spin-up time on the regional climate simulation results for such abnormal climate event, a total of 11 experiments were performed with different spin-up time from 10 days to 6 months, respectively. The simulation results show that, for the meteorological variables in the atmosphere, the model would be running in “climate mode” after 4-8-day spin-up time, then, it is independent of the spin-up time basically, and the simulation errors are mainly caused by the model＇ s failure in describing the atmospheric processes over the model domain. This verifies again that the regional climate modeling is indeed a lateral boundary condition problem as demonstrated by earlier research work. The simulated mean precipitation rate over each subregion is not sensitive to the spin-up time, but the precipitation scenario is somewhat different for the experiment with different spin-up time, which shows that there exists the uncertainty in the simulation to precipitation scenario, and such a uncertainty exhibits more over the areas where heavy rainfall happened. Generally, for monthly-scale precipitation simulation, a soin-uo time of 1 month is enough, whereas a spin-up time of 2 months is better for seasonal-scale one. Furthermore, the relationship between the precipitation simulation error and the advancement/withdrawal of East Asian summer monsoon was analyzed. It is found that the variability of correlation coefficient for precipitation is more significant over the areas where the summer monsoon is predominant. Therefore, the model＇s capability in reproducing precipitation features is related to the heavy rainfall processes associated with the advancement/withdrawal of East Asian summer monsoon, which suggests that it is necessary to develop a more reliable parameterization scheme to capture the convective precipitation of heavy rainfall pro- cesses associated with the activities of East Asian summer monsoon, so as to improve the climate modeling over China.