The role of soil moisture on summer atmospheric circulation climatology and persistent heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere

Land-atmosphere interactions are crucial in both weather and climate extremes. Studies have revealed certain large atmospheric circulation patterns such as amplified circumglobal wave 5 and 7 play important role in generating and maintaining surface extremes. These extremes can occur at the same time but different locations, for example in 2010, the wave 5 pattern was the driver for Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding. But how soil moisture and land-atmosphere interactions affect the climatology states of jetstreams, amplified waves, and hence persistent extremes still remains unclear.

Here, we employ large ensemble simulations from climate model EC-Earth 3 to study the role of soil moisture in affecting large-scale atmospheric circulation for the period of 2009 to 2016. Three sets of experiments (each set has 100 ensemble members) are carried out with perturbed atmosphere-soil moisture interactions and one reference run (100 members) in which the interaction between the atmosphere and the land is fully interactive. We show that atmosphere-soil moisture interactions strongly influence the climatological mean states of atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer season (June to August) and especially in July. With the same soil moisture climatology, the reference run showed an overall land warming that led to poleward migration of jet and a more Arctic front jet state.

 Additionally, West Russia is chosen for the case study area as it is a hotspot for both amplified wave 5 and wave 7 heat extremes. We define the long duration heatwave event as near-surface temperature exceeding 30^oC for at least eight days. The results show that with the soil-atmosphere interaction, the probability of such events increased from 2.2% to 5.8% for wave 5 and 0.47% to 4.5% for wave 7.